Mountain-Town Ski Week: Where We Actually Go in February

The first February we lived in Colorado, I got an email from Bella's school that just said "Reminder: Ski Week, Feb 17–21, no classes." I read it twice. I had been in the United States my whole life minus four years in San Miguel de Allende, and I had never heard the words "ski week" used the way the school district used them. A whole week. Off. In the middle of the school year. For skiing.

I called Eddie at the property office and he laughed at me for not knowing — he'd already been hearing about it from the rental clients booking their February stays a year out. Turns out mountain-town districts in Colorado often build a full February break into the calendar, and the reason is not pedagogical. It's the local economy. Half the kids in Bella's class have parents who work the mountain in some way, and Presidents' Day weekend isn't enough to staff a resort town through its busiest stretch. So the kids get a week, and the families get a week, and most years we use ours to fly south.

Why ski week exists (it's not really about skiing)

I want to be honest that I had to ask three different parents at pickup before I understood this. In our town, ski week — sometimes called intersession or mountain break — falls right around Presidents' Day. The district lines up the holiday with a full week off because:

It's the busiest week for resort employment, and a lot of families need parents physically on the mountain or running short-term rentals.
It's a peak booking week for the local economy. School being open would actively work against half the town's livelihood.
Honestly? The kids who do ski are out on the hill anyway, and the kids who don't are climbing the walls indoors. Better to formalize it.

If you're reading this from a non-mountain district, your kid probably gets a long Presidents' weekend and that's it. But the timing is the same nationally enough that airfares to Mexico are the airfares to Mexico — there's not a giant premium on the Tuesday-to-Tuesday window that we use.

What we actually do with it

I'll list the three configurations we've tried, in honest order of how often we do them.

1. Back to San Miguel de Allende

The first ski week we had after moving back to Colorado, we went to SMA. Bella was four and a half. She had been gone less than three months and she walked into Don Luis's courtyard like she'd never left, said "hola Don Luis, te extrañé" without prompting, and proceeded to spend the week chasing the building cat and being fed pan dulce by every neighbor on the block. I cried in the kitchen twice. Eddie pretended not to notice.

SMA in February is the warm-up week our bodies need. It's the dry season, the weather is perfect, and there's no Día de los Muertos crowd or Holy Week crowd. It's quiet. It's the version of SMA that feels most like our SMA.

2. A local-resort week with Bella

One year we just stayed put. Eddie had a property turnover crunch, I was deep in a freelance project, and Bella had finally figured out the magic carpet. We bought her a season pass to the local hill, did half-days on the mountain and half-days at the library, and it was lovely. Quietly lovely. The kind of week you don't post about because nothing photogenic happened.

3. Mexico City and the Tulum detour

The year Bella was five and a half, we did a split — three nights CDMX, four nights Tulum. CDMX was for me; I'd lived four years in Mexico and somehow never spent more than a weekend in the capital, and I wanted to fix that with a kid who could now reasonably walk a museum. Tulum was for Eddie and Bella. At the hotel pool, Bella met another six-year-old, also bilingual, also being raised between two countries — her mom was Mexican and her dad was from Vermont, and they lived half the year each place. The two girls held a forty-five minute conversation in fluid Spanglish about which Bluey episodes were the best ones. I sat there with my book open to the same page for the entire conversation.

I think a lot about how the only cure for the small ache of leaving a place is letting your kid keep meeting people who live the way you used to.

The honest scheduling math

If your kid's school doesn't have a ski week and you're trying to make a Mexico trip work around Presidents' Day, here's what I'd say:

Friday through Tuesday is plenty if you fly into a single city. Don't try to do CDMX and a beach in four days; one of them will get the bad version of you.
The Sunday flight back is always cheaper than the Monday flight back, and Bella has yet to be ruined by one tired-Tuesday at school.
Tell the teacher what you're doing and why. I'll write a whole post about that conversation, but the short version is: every teacher I've talked to has been more supportive than I expected.

Ski week is a privilege of the calendar we landed in, and I try not to take it for granted. We didn't pick this town for the ski-week schedule — we picked it for the long arc of Bella's schooling — but the calendar does feel like a small wink from the universe, an acknowledgment that family time in February is worth building into the structure of a year. Don Luis still asks every winter if we're coming for ski week. We usually are. And when we're not, Bella video-calls him from the lift line and tells him about the snow, and he tells her about the cempasúchil that aren't in season yet but will be soon.