January 14, 2010 E-MAIL PRINT

Farmhouse living a welcome option

by Tony Chamberlain/

The dining room table needs some expanding as this farmhouse is being shared by multiple families.

The dining room table needs some expanding as this farmhouse is being shared by multiple families.

Whether you’re planning your first family ski trip or have become a seasoned traveler, there always are those refinements that make the trip easier.

If you’re planning a local group trip — say, with more than one family — consider your lodging approach. Slopeside condo living for eight people or more is the first-class ticket and in may cases well worth the steep price it brings, even this year with a slow economy.

But a three-family gang that we put together not long ago took a different approach. We rented a large farmhouse in Intervale, N.H., near enough to all the Mount Washington Valley areas to make this trip a real smorgasbord of skiing and riding.

But it’s more than the variety of ski areas — Cranmore to Black to Wildcat — and everything in between that made this a really different kind of fun. It was our option off the slopes.

If you remember the days of ski clubs — when groups of friends motivated by a single love of the sport maintained residential lodging in ski country and met regularly in the mountains through the winter — then you’re tuned into a wonderful bygone era in skiing, as long gone as black-and-white movies.

There are a few ski clubs left, and most around this historic seat of skiing in the Northeast. We got into our farmhouse, figured out the sleeping arrangements, got the wood stove working and prepared for the week of living and planning adventures together.

We were not necessarily planning to stick to a strict budget, but if that’s a motivation then this is the approach to take. When we reckoned up after the trip, we found we had saved at least 40 percent over a more standard resort-oriented trip.

For starters, the price of the six-bedroom/one-loft farmhouse split among three families was half what on-slope lodging costs. True, we did not have the convenience of dressing and walking to the slopes in the morning, and we had to travel some places by car.

And there was no skiing or riding home to the waiting hot tub at night. But we had something else. Our typical evening would have us back at the house. While some tended to fire and firewood duties, others began plans for one of our big spaghetti or roast beef dinners that kept us around the huge dining table for an hour or more. The kids made their contributions to the labor, and all helped with the cleanup.

After dinner, we often went sledding out back on a slick, cold hill that rushed us down onto the ice on the lake. It took all the way to bedtime to get the jump just the right size and angle for a good toboggan jump.

A couple of days we split up as two couples wanted to do some nordic skiing and headed to the Jackson Ski Foundation trails, while the rest of us took the kids up to Black Mountain, also in the ski village of Jackson. We all met back at the historic Shovel Handle pub for the one of our rare dinners out of the farmhouse.

Our vacation ended like most — way too soon. But even kids who had been at first disappointed about not having a game room so spend a small fortune in the après ski hours were voted with the unanimous opinion to reserve the farmhouse for another week next season.

And an ancient tradition was born.

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