As much as I enjoy winter sports, it’s really hard to leave the house sometimes to participate in them. Especially on a cold night when you have the woodstove cranked up, or like today — a Sunday morning with warm coffee and the Sunday Times awaiting you after you’ve rolled leisurely out of bed.

This was one of those days. I would have preferred to sleep in. I had been fighting a cold and awoke a 7 a.m. with a pounding headache, inflamed sinuses, and a stuffed up nose. The last thing I wanted to do was get into a car and drive two hours and drop $70 on riding down icy trails on what was shaping up as bleak January day. But that was what we were going to do.

Two friends were driving over from Blue Hill — about 1.5 hours east of here — to meet us, and god damn it, we were going skiing and we were going to have fun whether we liked it or not. We scrambled to load up the truck with our gear, and the dog, who would spend that day at doggy daycare. I had my snowboard. Erin had her cross-country gear and our lunch.

Our friends, Ciona and James, waited for us patiently as we ran back into the house to grab last-minute items. I was finally ready and started to hop into the truck when Ciona said “what about your skis”. I wasn’t planning to bring them, but I said, “aw, what the hell, I may need them if the slopes are too icy.” I have kind of a love/hate relationship with cross country skiing. Today, I really didn’t want to XC ski unless I absolutely had to.

A week earlier, we’d been in Middlebury, Vermont to ski and visit family. The conditions there were equally bad, though much different. It was about 30 degrees warmer and raining in Vermont during the New Year holiday. The slopes at the Middlebury Snow Bowl were sparsely coated in rapidly melting, wet, heavy snow that had about as much glide as a wheel barrow full of concrete. After that miserable experience, I was determined to enjoy snowboarding today even though the conditions weren’t promising — only a dozen or so trails were open and conditions were described as loose granular in ski area lingo. What they really mean is you’ll be skiing on crushed ice, typical of east coast skiing more times than not.

We got a late start, which I wasn’t real happy about — I like to be on the slopes by 9, 9:30 at the latest. But 10 is usually more realistic for Erin and me. We left the house around 8:30 for western Maine’s mountains. About 2 hours later, we dropped Ciona and Erin off at the Nordic Center at the foot of Saddleback and headed up the steep access road to the base lodge. We parked the truck, grabbed our gear, and walked over to the lodge to buy our tickets. As we leaned our boards on the ski rack outside the lodge, I looked up at the mountain to scope things out. There was a fairly strong northwest wind blowing across the mountain. Immediately my stomach dropped. I could see the upper lifts weren’t moving. A wind hold! That meant we wouldn’t be able to access the upper terrain and trails.

We went into the lodge and waited in line for tickets. We got to the front of queue and the ticket agent more or less talked us out of buying a full day pass. She didn’t have to try very hard. The wind continued to howl. We took a look at the trail map which showed how few trails we’d have at our disposal and then at the lift lines and decided there were better ways to spend $50. We grabbed our boards and hopped back into the truck and descended back to the Nordic Center.

Thanks to Ciona, I was able to salvage the day. We met the women in the Nordic Center parking lot just before noon after they had skied a 3-mile loop. We had lunch in the center’s yurt. We ate tangerines, mozzarella string cheese, pretzels, blue corn chips and cookies. The main course was a homemade bread stuffed with chicken, cheese and roasted red peppers, baked by James’ partner, Kerri.

After lunch, we skied for about 3 hours. It turned out to be a perfect day for cross country skiing. It was wonderful to be in the woods and out of the wind. The groomed trails were smooth and fast. There was an inch or two of fresh snow on top. We went off the main trails and took a short ski on a rough snowshoe trail. A moose had walked through a few hours earlier. And his hoof prints were everywhere. We could hear nothing but the breeze and a few chickadees and tiny kinglets chirping in the hemlocks above us.

By 3 p.m., we were ready to call it a day. We stopped at the yurt again for hot drinks and then headed back to Hallowell. On the way home, just about sunset, we saw a weasel run across the road in his white winter coat with a large mouse in tow. An amazing sight and one I’d never seen before. It sort of made the whole trip worthwhile now that I think about it.