Monday 24 August 2015

First day

So we arrived in Saas Fee under the cover of heavy snow, kind of normal over here I would imagine and we found the rather large Chalet that we are staying in called Granite of all things, very stylish. It was then time to be measured for our skis, I've not done this before but they take your weight, height and then you get a value which indicates the length and width of the ski's that you are suggested to use. After begin allocated a set of ski's poles, helmet and boots, it was quick bite to eat then bed.

As morning appeared I pulled on all my ski items that I had ordered online from a mixture of Amazon and Mountain warehouse. Then tie to head up to the training slope as you can see the view on the bridge as we left was wonderful and snowy.



Learning was a mixture of fear and falling over, but once you are over the hurdle of it's not painful to fall over (just slightly embarrassing), it's easy to get to snow ploughing, just a bit hard on your knees. After a full morning of going up and down the training slope we headed up the mountain to the restaurant half way up the mountain.

Two views from the restaurant up the mountain.



During lunch my instructor got a call from the other guys in my party as they were going to head to Saas Grund for the afternoon as most of the Saas Fee runs were closed due to excessive snow. I elected to remain on the training slopes, to which my instructor replied that it was a good choice as Saas Grund had only run and black runs on it, not great for a beginner. On the way back at the end of the day I could hear them blasting the snow off the mountain, essentially creating avalanches so that people can ski in the morning as long it doesn't snow to heavily over night. Tomorrow some real blue runs.....



Tuesday 17 February 2015

Heading to Switzerland

I decided that I should learn to ski at some point in my life. So I'm currently heading to Switzerland with my friends Craig, Rachel, Tom and Julie. They have all been skiing before and so I'm going to taking some lessons and learning and then we can play on the slopes. Hopefully I'll get a basic hang of it after a few days....

First there is the question to getting there, instead of flying we decided to take a car, queue drama about snow chains (mandatory in Switzerland apparently), road tolls (Swiss and French), insurance, ferry or Eurostar, roof racks and roof boxes. Needless to say Craig arranged pretty much all of the travel arrangements and are going to stay in France on the way back, in Dijon.

So we headed out on the road driving in shifts, the front seats job was to keep the driver awake during their stint driving. It worked really well across the whole journey, only issue was the ferry was delayed an hour and a half, then we had a two hour queue at the boarder between France and Switzerland, seemed everyone needed to buy a vignette(Swiss road toll) at the boarder including us. They charge quite a bit of postage so I can only assume everyone avoided it like us.

So now we are safely in Switzerland in Saas Grund and tomorrow we head to Saas Fee ski resort


Sleeping in the car on the way, whops