My family has been out here visiting for the last couple days. We've been getting together and doing things almost everyday. Yesterday was a holiday for pioneer day and we decided to go up to Park City and go down the alpine slide. The last time I went down the alpine slide was when I was like 8 years old. I can clearly remember it. That was back when it only cost $5 to go down. My brother and I went the first time and we were a little hesitant to go very fast, but we still had a lot of fun. When we got down to the bottom we both wanted to go again. My parents weren't the wealthiest of people and our mom told us that if we wanted to go again, we would have to spend our own money. Well after some careful consideration, both my brother and I decided to use our own money to go down the slide again. Now $5 back then was also like a months worth of money to an 8 year old, so we really thought it was worth it.

All the way up the lift we talked about our plan to go super fast down the slide. We were even going to try to get some air off of the little drop offs that were on the track. To say the least we were excited and determined to get our moneys worth.

We got our sleds and stood in the line at the top to wait our turn to go down. In front of me was a nice little old lady. When she took off she didn't seem very excited to go fast. I thought, "Man, I'm gonna go SO much faster than her, and I'm only eight." The slide attendant made me wait for a few minutes and then gave me the okay to go.

I took off and started to pick up some real speed. I was going much faster now than I was the first time. I took the corners so fast and thought about how worth it it was to have paid my own $5 to go down one more time. As I was thinking this I was about one third of the way down the track. And suddenly I came up really fast on the little old lady who was going at a snails pace. I didn't know what to do. I was only eight and wasn't sure if it was appropriate to tell the lady to hurry up. I just followed her the rest of the way down at her sluggish pace. I was upset and confused at the same time. I didn't know what to do. My hard earned $5 was practically wasted because of some overly cautious granny. What made it worse was that my older brother caught up to us about half of the way down and was yelling at me to go faster when I couldn't.

We got down to the end of the track where our parents were waiting smiling at us. They asked how it was, and I couldn't help but cry as I explained my frustration caused by the little old slow lady who apparently cared nothing about my huge sacrifice of money to ride the coveted alpine slide.