Beginner Ski Resorts

Exams are done and all the news so far has been good, so we'll go with that for now. Ski season is in full swing. We're still in our stamina building phase of the season and since I did a number on my hip and knee slipping on ice around Christmas, we are still frequenting the smaller resorts. We went to Snow Valley over the holidays and 4 hours was more than enough. By the end of that amount of time we'd done all there was to do. We did try to do a full day at Mt. St. Louis Moonstone. Well we got a full day's worth of skiing in, only it only took about 3 hours. It was quiet, only one chalet was open. Don't ask which, I can't ever remember which is which. We did circuit after circuit, down the hill and up the chair in roughly 5 minutes. WOW!
The next weekend we went to Horseshoe. Wow, but for totally different reasons. Huge lineups for tickets, huge lineups at the lifts, lineups in the chalet to get a table in the lunch room, no table later to have hot chocolate and masses of people everywhere. The beginner runs were so crowded they were dangerous. For the first time in over a decade of regular skiing I was hit. A skier behind me hit me as I was going around a class. Fortunately, the moguls were quiet and as I set myself the goal of learning to ski them this year, it worked out. My view of humanity suffered however.
This past weekend we went to Glen Eden. Our past experience with this hill was favourable and as we got a late start, we decided not to go too far. Again, hordes of people. Most of them appeared to be beginners and on top of that, one of the lifts was closed. The lineups were interminable. My hips and knees started to ache from standing in ski boots and skis so long. There was some comedy though. At the front of each lift line, an employee directed the skiers in order that each chair went up full in order to keep the line moving. One person from the singles line would be paired up with a trio, two pairs placed together, etc. Well we were told to follow in when we noticed that this guy had jumped the queue and was going to be the fifth person on a four person chair. We told him he was supposed to wait, but he said he needed to join his family, who was already on a lift. How he proposed to do this, I have no idea. We let him go as we were having no impact on his counting skills and he ended up on a chair by himself. He didn't pull down the safety bar and when instructed to do so by the operators now below him, he turned and took their picture. He finally figured that out and in the process lost one of his poles. We just howled. Dearest husband pointed out that he had the trifecta of inappropriate ski behaviour, 1. He didn't know what he was doing, 2. English was clearly not his first language so figuring out the instructions others were giving him was a problem, and 3. He was completely oblivious as simple observation (we were standing in those lines forever) would have cleared up his lack of knowledge. Oh well for us he will always be Mr. Camera.