We went skiing (Breckenridge) on Christmas Eve, but managed to leave the camera in the car. You'll have to settle for pictures from December 23, when we had Eldorado Canyon State Park almost entirely to ourselves for a winter hike. (There was no one around to take a group shot, so we took turns posing. Hana was uncharacteristically camera-shy.)

When we lived in Brussels, we loved being able to get to Paris in an hour and 20 minutes via high-speed train.

We discovered yesterday that we can get from our driveway to the slopes at Keystone in exactly the same amount of time. It's not the rooftops of Paris, but the panorama appeared equally dreamlike to our Midwestern eyes.

By the way, the "Slow Trail of the Day" (indicated by the yellow sign on the right) proved to be a real gift as my muscles struggled to remember how to ski after nearly three years off the slopes.

(Photo courtesy of Jim and his Blackberry)

As Christmas approaches, I've been nostalgic for the variety, low prices, and ease of shopping in Europe's open-air markets. In an attempt to replicate the experience (well, sort of), I finally stopped yesterday at the Brass Armadillo Antiques Mall (BAAM), which I pass regularly on the drive to the animal shelter. On the outside, BAAM looks like a warehouse. On the inside, its contents were nearly as diverse, if decidedly American, as the offerings at the daily market at Les Marolles in Brussels.

I didn't find any Danish art glass at BAAM, and there were just too many vendors with old Matchbox cars to search for the VW Beetles that I also collect. I did discover two American ceramics makers that I'd never heard of, both located in places I've called home. (Let's be honest here, the only vintage American pottery that I could have identified prior to yesterday was Fiestaware. And speaking of vintage Fiestaware, my brother's friend Steven, who collects it, is probably worth more than many Wall Street bankers, based on the prices that I saw yesterday.)

Roseville Art Pottery was manufactured in Ohio—we lived in Cleveland Heights for eight years—in the first half of the 20th century. Most of the pieces I saw yesterday were too over-the-top design-wise for my taste, such as this er, um pitcher. At least now I know what I'm looking at.

Weirdly enough, the pottery that really caught my eye was manufactured by Coors. Yes, that Coors. The beer company manufactured ceramics, mostly utilitarian items like dinnerware, for about two decades prior to World War. The patterns, such as the popular Rosebud design, were simple and came in a variety of colors, à la Fiestaware. I was quite taken with a bean pot—a pot just for beans, imagine that!—in this blue Rosebud pattern.

BAAM also offers vintage Western-themed items, including horse brasses, elaborately engraved silver spurs, pairs of shoot-em-out guns in tooled leather holsters, cowboy boots, ten-gallon hats, and (yuck) cowhide lampshades.

The strangest antique at BAAM? A wooden milk box for home delivery from the Cleveland Heights Dairy, which was so old that the phone number on the side began with letters rather than numbers. How did a milk box from Cleveland Heights, Ohio end up in Wheat Ridge, Colorado?

Note to Gayle and Tim: If it hadn't cost nearly $100, I would have bought that milk box for you on the spot.

Unlike many skiers, I enjoy riding slow chairlifts. In addition to giving aching, middle-aged muscles a rest, you get to see a lot of things from a lift, and not just hotdoggers who ski so well you feel like retreating to the lodge for the rest of your skiing life.

At Lake Louise, we listened to a middle-aged man coax his furious, scared wife down a moguls run, shouting, "I'm SORRY, I'm SORRY, honey" as she inched down the bumps. Bet he had to sleep in the hotel lobby that night.

At Nub's Nob, I watched a little boy, still in the pole-free stage of learning to ski, flapping his arms like a baby bird as he tried to get some "air" on a miniature snow ramp.

My all-time favorite is the orange lift on the back hills of Nub's Nob. It ascends through a quiet forest, where tiny birds dart back and forth. On the orange lift, you can go eyeball-to-eyeball with a squirrel scampering up a tree. The clinking of the old metal lift parts sounds like Buddhist temple bells among the snow-covered pines.

Mostly, sitting on the slow chairlift gives my mind a chance to meander around aimlessly, which, while not particularly productive, is recuperative in its own way. So when I watched "Solilochairliftquist," which was profiled in the Sunday Denver Post, I knew that I wasn't the only skier who felt, as the article's title puts it, "the Zen of a slooow chairlift."