Sunshine attracts the nicest people

As most of you know, I'm a SnowHost at Sunshine Village ski resort, and write about all my ski days on another blog, PowderWatch.com. That blog reports on snow conditions, and while this is about something that happened at Sunshine, it has nothing to do with snow conditions.

As a SnowHost, one of the things we do is greet people. Sometimes, people aren't the happiest in the morning. Their drive hasn't been good, the kids are unhappy, they had to get up early. Start your day badly and my observation is that it can go on like that too far. So a cheery greeting, an offer of help, an interaction with a kid -- these things go a long way to making people's day better, and it can turn around a bad morning. For decades, I've just generally interacted with people in the parking lot, and occasionally start conversations with folks parked around me about current conditions, lousy drivers, or anything else.

Karen and I got to the parking lot on New Year's day, and were parked next to a red car with two young ladies in it. We're packed in like sardines, so I made sure that we could each open our car doors and get boots on and I wasn't in their way. This led to a conversation about conditions, about New Year's Eve and their hangovers, about their drive in, about having a great day, and we just chatted while getting ready. Nice young ladies. By the time we walked away they were seriously pumped about their day.

At the end of the day, I got back to my car. The red car was gone, and this was under my windshield wiper.

Awwwww...

Now, I'm an old fart, readily double their ages. Notes like that -- heck, nice things being said about me by nice and beautiful women in general -- never happened when I was in my 20's. Karen says they left the note because I'm "charming". Probably the fact that I'm "harmless" also had something to do with it, since I'm clearly not cuter than I was when I was 20.