For the past 15 years, I’ve gone to New England each winter to meet up with my friends Adele and Sheara and to go cross-country skiing. We stay at inns or condos and have skied on trails in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, always looking for new adventures.
Cape Elizabeth, Maine: How to get there, where to stay, where to eat, what to do
But never had we experienced anything quite like what we found in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, last winter. Skiing on the beach. And being able to walk out the back door in the morning and just start gliding.
This was cross-country skiing as it must have begun, as it was meant to be. You walked out of your house, strapped on your skis and off you went, most likely into the woods. Perhaps you were off to shoot your dinner and bring it back to your rustic one-room cabin to cook it over the fire.
No rustic here, though. We were living in vacation luxury, thrilled to be staying in a place that offered a Nordic ski-in, ski-out arrangement. All the other years, we’d lugged our gear to the car, hoped that we hadn’t left our ski boots in the trunk (brrrr) and driven someplace where we paid for a trail pass to attach to our coat zippers.
In Cape Elizabeth, at the Inn by the Sea, there were no trail passes to pay for, no clothing racks filled with ski wear to entice and distract us, no ski center at all. More people probably stayed there for the spa offerings than for the skiing. In fact, we might have been the only people there with skis.
We walked out back that first morning raring to go. One thing we hadn’t thought about was that we might have to blaze a trail to the beach.
The back sidewalks had been shoveled after a recent big snow. But no one yet had touched the walkway down to the sea.
We were undaunted. Sheara stepped onto the hill, holding her skis, figuring she’d put them on once she was on the snow. With a little shriek, she sank in up to her thigh. That wasn’t going to work.
I tried method two. I clicked into my skis while standing on the plowed sidewalk and then stepped laterally onto the snow, one ski and then, quickly, the other. With my weight distributed across the two planks on my feet, I sank just a few inches. We had traction!
Off we went toward the water, the sharp sun reflecting off the wintry white ground.
We plowed through the snow, carving new tracks. Buried sea grasses poked through on both sides of the path. Before long, we reached the little snowy hills that had once been sand dunes. For a moment, the ocean was hidden. We had to herringbone up the small rise so as not to slip backward.
And then, there we were, on the sea side of the dune, the Atlantic stretching before us. The beach was part sand, part snow, the split demarcated by a curved line carved by high tide.
It was one of those moments when you find yourself with a silly grin on your face, not believing that you’ve been lucky enough to arrive at this place, at this moment, in this tableau.