Spring Break in Upstate NY: Why We Skip the Beach | Park City Moms

Spring break in Park City is, by tradition, when half the school district decamps to Cabo, a quarter goes to Hawaii, and the rest split between Costa Rica and "a beach somewhere, we'll figure it out." Our family does none of that. We get on a plane to Albany. We rent the world's most embarrassing minivan. We drive an hour and a half to my parents' house in the woods of Upstate New York, and we stay for ten days. Hazel and Owen know every dirt road. They know which neighbor has the goats. They know the exact step on the back porch that creaks.

I am not going to pretend this is a glamorous trip. It is the opposite of glamorous. It's also, by a wide margin, the most important week on our family's calendar.

Why we made this our spring break, on purpose

Hazel and Owen are growing up in Park City. That is a privilege. It is also, if I'm honest, a bubble. The bubble has French Immersion and Woodward and family ski playdates and a particular flavor of mountain-town affluence that I love but do not want to be the entire furniture of my children's worldview. Spring break is when we deliberately pull them out of it.

My parents — both ex-hippies, both Upstate-rooted in a way that shows up in every detail of their house — live on a few acres outside of a small town that is exactly the way it was when I was Hazel's age. The kids' rituals are unchanging. They run to the chickens. They check the maple taps. They read on the same couch I read on. They reset.

The week, in shape

Maple syrup season. We time the trip to it. Late March into early April is the sugar window in our part of New York, and my dad has been tapping a small cluster of trees at the back of the property for as long as I've been alive. The kids walk the line with him, check the buckets, drag the sled with the collection jugs back to the boil-down. The boil-down is in a janky little sugar shack he built in 1992. The smell is one of those things that goes straight to a part of your nervous system you can't reach any other way.
My mom's sound bath. Once per visit. She sets up in the living room with her bowls. The kids lie on the rug under wool blankets. Owen falls asleep within four minutes every single time. Hazel takes it seriously now, which is new this year. My mom has been doing this work since before "sound bath" was a phrase you could put on a studio schedule, and watching her hold space for her own grandchildren is the single most full-circle thing I have in my life.
A half-day at Killington. This is non-negotiable. We drive across the Vermont line and ski Killington for half a day, mid-week. The kids' East Coast cousins meet us. There is hot chocolate. There is a base lodge that smells like wet wool. There is the specific, bracing, character-building experience of skiing on what New Englanders call "hardpack" and what everyone west of the Rockies calls "a parking lot with stripes."
Friend day. The kids see the same childhood-friends-of-mine's-kids every year. It's a network of four families in a thirty-mile radius and the children have grown up alongside Hazel and Owen as a kind of extended cousin set. They show up at my parents' house, the kids run off into the woods, the adults sit on the porch with coffee. This is the most regenerative day of the trip for me.
One quiet day. Books. Pajamas. A puzzle. We do not schedule it. It always happens.

The Killington bit, fully activated

I will defend this until I die. East Coast skiing is not lesser. It is different. Park City powder is the most generous, forgiving, ego-flattering snow on the continent, and I love it; it is also, in skill-building terms, very easy to look good on. Killington in late March is sheet ice, refrozen granular, slush at noon, ice again by 3pm, and the kind of trees that have rocks in them. You learn to ski on East Coast hardpack and you can ski anywhere. You learn to ski on Park City powder and you can ski Park City.

I taught at The Canyons (Jeff still calls it that, please continue not to @ him) in my twenties. I have watched Western kids try to ski Stowe and Killington in March and I have watched them be humbled. Hazel and Owen need a little East Coast in their edges. Utah powder will never compare to East Coast concrete and that is a feature. That is character.

For half a day. Then we go back to grandma's and have grilled cheese. I'm not a monster.

What this trip isn't

It isn't Instagram. We don't take a lot of photos. There is no infinity pool. There are no pristine outfits. My mother does not own anything that would photograph well. The aesthetic of this trip is mud, flannel, and a kitchen table that has been the same kitchen table for forty years.

And that is exactly why we do it. The whole rest of our year is, by the structure of our life, very curated. I'm a yoga teacher with a public face; Jeff is climbing in banking; we do, candidly, run a fairly Instagram-friendly version of the Park City mom life. Spring break is the week we are deliberately, intentionally, off-stage. The kids do not even ask for the iPad. They are too busy being feral on a few acres of someone else's land.

The grandparents piece

I want to say this clearly because it matters. My parents are getting older. They are healthy and lucid and still tap maple trees with their grandchildren, but I do not take a single one of these visits for granted. Hazel and Owen will remember this house. They will remember my mother's voice and my father's hands and the smell of the boil-down and the specific creak of the porch step. The fact that we made spring break the trip we never skip — over Cabo, over Hawaii, over a wellness escape that I would absolutely also love — is the most intentional decision in our family calendar.

Set an intention for your spring break. If your kids' grandparents are alive and healthy and rooted somewhere, consider making the trip be the grandparents. There's no version of this I will regret.

I know this is a less flashy spring break post than the ones in your feed right now. The kids are not in matching swimsuits. There is no swim-up bar. But Hazel and Owen come back from Upstate New York with mud on their pants and a kind of softness in their eyes that no resort has ever produced, and that is the version of spring break our family chose. Maple syrup, a sound bath, a half-day on East Coast concrete, and ten days of being known by people who knew me before I was anyone's mom. That's the trip. That's the whole thing.