Snowy Season Escapes

For many years, the Woodstock Inn has held a special place as a winter getaway for my parents, married for over 60 years. Spending thirty-plus of those years in retirement in Connecticut and Cape Cod, my parents rarely needed to venture out of New England to find a respite. The trip to the Woodstock Inn, taken by car with my father behind the wheel, became a destination to which they would invite their grown children and grandchildren and to experience the resort’s ski area, Suicide Six.  Admittedly, the meshing of old and new memories can be a wonderful and yet complicated experience, especially when it involves multi-generational participants with varied interests and weakened emotional reserves. That was our situation when my mother, my daughters, and I embarked on a Christmas vacation to the Woodstock Inn in December 2019 — the first holiday season since my mother and I were both widowed earlier that year.  My mother, Jeanine, who does not embrace travel and certainly not without my father, surprisingly requested late that Fall that my daughters, ages 12 and 15, and I journey to this special place with her.  My father, who passed away at 89, had skied Suicide Six for the last time in his 80s, but despite our recommending it to friends, my daughters, Emma and Audrey, had not yet visited the resort.  Both were ecstatic to ski there for the first time and see for themselves what makes this area so appealing.  Being used to my father driving, my mother arranged a car service to take the four of us to the Inn and, with the staff’s help, I was fortunate to successfully book a set of rooms despite the late-stage planning.