Amy Currioman

I love how the Internet has made so many of us “global citizens.”  I can remember when I had to work really hard to get information about things that were happening out of town!  If you wanted information on a particular town, you had to contact the local chamber of commerce and try to get copies of the local newspapers.  If you wanted to buy something specific to that town, like Georgia Dome tickets, or United Center Tickets or even Tournament of Roses Parade Tickets you had to use the long distance operator to try to help you find telephone numbers and then make a seemingly never-ending series of long distance telephone calls to try to find out how to get tickets!

But now, with the advent of the Internet, and the increasing access it has made possible to the consumer, you can get all of those things just with the click of a mouse and a credit card or paypal account!  The ease in which this can be done is almost unimaginable to those of us who were adults before the Internet was invented.  It truly is a modern marvel!

Because I fell in love with downhill skiing when I was a teenager, when I became an adult and went to work and got vacation time, I spent all of my vacations on skiing holidays during the winter!  Before I managed to move to New England, I joined a local ski-enthusiast singles only club and went with the club on group vacations to various ski resorts.  As a single lady, I had more fun than you can even imagine!  We would rent out townhouses right on the slopes so that we could ski right out of our townhouse right onto the mountain!

The very first time I went on a group skiing holiday like that the other skiiers encouraged me to take skiing lessons.  Since the cost of a couple of lessons was included in the cost of the entire trip I readily agreed.  I could not believe how much my skiing improved after only one lesson!  By the end of the first lesson I had moved from the bunny trails to the intermediate trails.  By the end of the second lesson I was introduced to the expert trails.  If I had known that taking a few lessons would have improved my skiing so much, and so quickly, I would have tried to take lessons much sooner!

When I was a young teenager, I met some people who said that they loved downhill skiing.  At that point in time, I had only ever done water-skiing, and I was very good at it.  I loved to water-ski!  So I mentioned to my parents that I would really like to try downhill skiing sometime, and much to my surprise, that very winter our parents took the whole family downhill skiing!  Well, we didn’t bother to take lessons so we sure did fall down a lot!  But we sure did have fun!  That started a very long love of downhill skiing – so much so that I ended up moving to New England so that I could ski more often!