¶ … Elevator New Year's Day is supposed to be a joyous time of celebration, of families and best friends sitting down to unending snacks and kids getting away with stuff because mom and dad just might have slight hangovers from all that partying the night before.

Let me set the scene for you. On January 1, 2012, our family was spending the weekend on fabulous Blue Mountain (www.skibluemt.com) and boy we were planning to do some serious skiing and snowboarding to ring in the New Year. But that darn old global warming: instead of the heavenly white powder we dreamed of, we got hellish doses of brutally cold winter rain.

Our disappointment would be like the Queen of England finding only faded cut off jeans and bleach-stained hoodies in her closet to wear to the coronation of her son as Prince.

So what do you do if you're a 7th grader with six friends, you're hanging out in a mountain hotel and it's raining so you can't go skiing?

Hey, us boys were bored. Really bored. There is a true story in a New York Times' best selling book...

We're talking 2.6 million dollars in damage -- plus one missing boy and two boys in full-body casts for 8 months.
No, that wasn't our crew, but we did cause quite a fuss, and wait till you hear this one.

So we're bored -- have I mentioned that we were 7 teenage boys terribly, frighteningly, hideously bored on the 3rd floor of a hotel on New Year's Day?

First we ordered pizza -- what did you think we'd order, escargots and salmon bisque? We wolfed down the pizza in our hotel room and set out for some adventure -- having not the slightest, vaguest notion of the misadventure we were about to be involved with.

We jumped in the hotel elevator, there was pushing, slapping and shoving. Typical adolescent stuff. But when one of the boys hit the wrong button on the elevator control board -- YIKES!, SOMEBODY HELP U.S.! We were stalled. Stuck. Trapped for THREE HOURS!

Now picture this: we…