Olympic Fanfare

Cue the Olympic Fanfare. The Olympic torch was in my hand! It took me back to the days when our family living room became an imaginary skating rink as my sisters and I mimicked the Olympic skaters as they leaped and twirled their way toward the medal stands.

Never mind that there were no ice skating rinks within two hours of our Pratt County farm. A girl could dream, couldn't she?

The Utah Olympic Park in Park City, Utah, was one of the stops along the way during our recent trip to Idaho.

The park was the site for the 2002 Winter Olympics' bobsled, skeleton, luge and Nordic ski-jumping events. Summer doesn't mean that athletes are taking a vacation from training for the 2014 Winter Olympics.

(I guess little farm boys have dreams, too, don't they?)

Cradled by the Wasatch Mountains, the Olympic Park has a 750,000-gallon freestyle training pool into which skiers and snowboarders hurl themselves all summer long.

(You can see the skier on the left takeoff ramp. Click on the photo to make it bigger.)

I wouldn't have wanted to do a belly-flop after all those tuck and flip maneuvers!

Best of all, it was free. It was like watching Wide World of Sports in the comfort of your living room ... with the added benefit of a cool mountain breeze.

We also watched competitors leap from the ski jumps and land on turf. We decided it was a sport for tall, thin people. Darn, that took us out of the equation!

We didn't opt for the ziplines or the comet bobsled lines either. They weren't free, after all. (Yeah, right .. that's the reason we didn't do it!)