Summit County
 

Our family is planning a week in Dillon in Feb. Our children 2 and 3 1/2 will be with us. I think we will spend most days at Keystone (closest resort to our housing) but I am looking for other fun activites. I hope to do one sleigh ride dinner....cheesey but I think the kids will have fun.

Keystone offers sleigh rides. They also have ice skating outdoors at Lakeside Village with rentals on site. Check out www.keystone.snow.com for more details.

There's a really good pizza/pasta/sandwich place in Dillon called Jersey Boys. Dine in or take out.

Frisco has an excellent nordic facility if you want to snowshoe or cross country ski. The rent on site, including those little ski "trailers" for the kiddos that you pull behind you.

Breckenridge is only about 15 minutes from Dillon, so you could easily venture over there as well. There are more shopping and eating options there than you'll find in Dillon/Silverthorne or Keystone.

In addition to Sundown excellent recommendation Copper Mt/ (ten miles further west on I-70) has a tubing hill that looks great.

Thanks for the advice. I thought Breck. was farther than that.
We will try Jersey Boys for sure.
I am also wondering about renting skis for the week for our 3 yr. old....any suggestions.

The Keystone sleigh ride dinner isn't cheesy at all! It's great fun. Since you'll be staying in Dillon, you might want to rent skis at the Sports Authority in Dillon Ridge shopping center. I think they have the best rates.

Check out breakfast at the Arapahoe Cafe. You won't regret it. The fondue restaurant in Keystone, on top of the mountain, is family friendly fun. Your kids might be a little young though. There are a ton of activities for kids in Keystone.

Your 3 1/2 year old would probably do fine skiing. I would put him in ski school for one or two days and see how he does. We introduced our daughter to ski at that age. We tried a private instructor the first year and a group instruction a year later. The group is much less expensive and she seemed to enjoy that more. You see a lot of 3 to 4 year olds flying down the hill after one day. The 3 year old and probably even the 2 year old would love tubing at Keystone. You can ride the gondola up and do this for an hour. It is really fun, no big chance of getting hurt, and not overly expensive. Breckenridge has more places to eat and shop than Keystone. They do not have any tubing at Breck. They do have ice skating. We did a sleigh ride/dinner a few years ago at Keystone and enjoyed it. One big thing you would want to know with small children on this ride is there are no bathrooms at the log cabin where you have dinner. They may have had an outhouse or portapotty, i can't remember for certain. A lot of the lodges offer heated swimming pools. It is fun to swim in the snow. Almost all of them have a hot tub available.

Donah, Breck is little more than 15min from Dillon as you thought but not substantially more -- at the most 25 mins. Frisco is the hub of the Summitt Cty ski areas. It is nearly equal distance from Frisco to all three areas. It is the hub for the county bus system. For this reason, we always stay in the Frisco area. Dillon is on the east side of the dam is a little further from Breck and lot further from Copper. When the dam and Lake Dillon was created, the original town of Dillon was moved higher up the mountain side to avoid been flooded. Silverthorne is the original construction camp for the building of the dam. It was never intended to be a town but after the dam was finished a lot of the construction families refused to move away and it grew into its own town. That dam provides most of our water so be nice to it.

Any of the resorts up there will have rentals for little kids. Kids that age seem to do incredibly well. Their little skis are about the same width as adult skis, giving them a great base, plus their center of gravity is so low they don't fall down all that easily--and don't fall very far when they do.

The group classes are fun to watch! It's a big chain of little folks, following each other along. I didn't research the pricing, but group lessons don't tend to cost much more than a lift ticket alone.