It Was All I Dreamed It Would Be

...except in my dreams I was younger and thinner and a much better skater ;-D. 

We don't normally get cold enough long enough to grow enough ice to safely skate on farm ponds in Kentucky.  It's not been over 30 since Christmas and it's been as cold as -4.  When I was walking out back the other night and saw June out in the middle of the pond and how thick the ice looked...I got the bug.  

I can remember as a kid, riding the school bus looking at frozen ponds, wishing I had a pond to skate on.  We'd go down to the creeks and fake skate, but it wasn't the same.  One year it did get cold enough to skate on a nearby lake and I remember going over there to this day.  

I decided to take a chance on finding a pair of skates in Lexington yesterday and hit the road for the Lexington Ice Center.  They didn't have any skates for sale, but gave me the name of the person at the pro shop who "might be able to help".  I gave her a call.

I have a feeling she'd been asked many times over about buying skates for use on farm ponds but was kind and as helpful as she could be.  She could take my measurements and order skates, but by the time they got here, I knew it would be too late.  I was crushed.

"Wait, I do have some used skates for sale.  What size do you need?"  I told her and she thought for a second and said "I have one pair that might work for you.  Let me call you back in a couple minutes."  She called me back with instructions to go in and find the manager and he would show me the skates.  

As the pro shop wasn't actually open, she spent several minutes on the phone giving me fitting instructions and a stern warning about skating on unsafe ice.  I went in, tried on the one pair of skates she said might work...and they fit perfectly.  I headed home in near disbelief...or as we like to say "I can't believe it's finally happening!"

This first thing I did when I got home was take a drill out to check the ice thickness.  The thinnest spot I could find was a little over 4" and a couple other spots I checked were at least 5", deeper than my drill bit.  I checked for any spots that might have any current or some other issue and felt like it was okay.  I only got to skate for a couple minutes though before it got dark.  

This morning I went out to see if I could broom off some of the snow patches that were giving me trouble last night and, yikes, the pond was cracking and popping and I quickly beat tracks back to the house.  I did some google research and found out all sorts of amazing things about ice, especially ice when the sun hits it and the temperatures are increasing or decreasing...  

I felt like "on paper" the ice was just fine, even thicker today than yesterday, but discretion being the better part of valor, decided to wait until Tim could get home to babysit me.  He drilled a few more spots and walked all over the pond and declared it safe.  I laced up my very own skates and had an amazing afternoon skating on my very own ice rink.  I can't wait to go back out tomorrow!

I'm sitting on a lawn chair here, not flat on my butt on the ice ;-).