Austria - Ski weekend, Feb 06
Hi All, Craig here..
Ok, so, now we're only about 2 - 3 months behind!. not bad!!!
Things are going well...finally had out first Sunny day today (Saturday 22nd April)..
Was quite a laugh walking down to Clapham highroad to see the HUNDREDS if not thousands of people with picnic blankets/hammocks etc.. out on Clapham Common ...wish I'd had the camera...
If the weather holds we're off up to Hampstead Heath tomorrow, supposed to be a nice spot..
Anyways, in feb we took a quick sneaky weekend away to Austria for some skiing / snowboarding.
We headed off Friday afternoon out to Standstead airport for the cheap flight option.
Quick hop in the Ryan Air air-taxi service ( "that'll be £30 thank you sir") and we were in Salzburg ,Austria.
...land of the Governator..
A bit of a wait in the airport for our Shuttle out to Saalbach-Hinterglemm , which is the name given to the area we were staying in..
The reason it has a bit of a strange double name is it's actually 2 Villages quite close to each other within a valley surrounded by ski mountains.
As we were waiting it started to snow, which was great since there hadn’t been much snow till then over the last few weeks, and conditions weren't that great for skiing...
We finally found our Shuttle bus guy and headed off towards Saalbach-Hinterglemm in the snow..
And, my god, did it snow! ...30CM's that night right over the are we were skiing!..allright!
...anyways, getting ahead of myself....So, it was about a 3 hour drive in a Blizzard from Salzburg, the likes of which we hadn’t seen since....well, last year in Niagara...but still, it was a lot of snow!
Lucky for us, Caren had managed to retain a lot of her schoolgirl German, and was able to converse fairly well with the driver who had no english, and he told us he hadn't seen snow this heavy in many years. Very friendly chap, full of great old stories that we could only understand 1 out of every 5 words of!
..and so we arrived at the Village, and were dropped of...it was 12 Midnight by that stage and the Village was utterly silent, the blanket of fresh and falling snow deadening any stray sounds, leaving only the crunching of our snowboots and the echoes of our foggy breathing as we made our way up the steep road towards our accommodation; too steep for the shuttle bus to traverse in the heavy snow.
...and here we ran into our first problem...the place was shut!
"Hmm" we thought .. Here we are at midnight, in the middle of a blizzard, in a completely closed up village where very few people are likely to speak english!
So we hammered on the door of the Chalet/Hotel for about 10 minutes..
Finally the proprietor came down (in his Undies) to see what the racket was....we did our best attempt at explaining in German, but it obviously wasn’t good enough, as he went to get his english speaking wife out of bed (lol).
“So”, we explained "we have a booking" , to which she replied "no you don't, we're full!"
"Hmmm"
So that was trouble...However, luckily for us the blizzard had meant one booking hadn’t been able to show up that night, and so, in a show of Austrian hospitality (which, it turns out, is quite easy to find!) , she let us have the room, and even let us have it for the discounted rate we believed we booked it at.
So, we hit the sack, a bit worse for wear, and a bit miffed that we'd have to find a new place to stay in the morning rather than go skiing! ...but what the hell, at least we were there and the snow was Fantastic!
(The Hotel Astrid, our first night accommodation...snow still falling the next morning!...)
Next morning we had a hearty breakfast, and humped out gear down to the Village centre to look for the tourist info centre.
It was all very clearly signposted (typical German efficiency, although god help you if you call them German!) , and we soon had new accommodation sorted...a 10 min Bus ride up the valley to our new place.
Ok, so, finally, sorted!...off to rent our gear and get up the slopes!
(Us walking up the village centre looking for the Info centre)
There was certainly no shortage of ski rental places, and we soon had Ski's (for Caren) and a Board (for me) sorted.
The cool thing about this area is that its a great big long valley, and ALL along it there is a free bus's that do circuits between the MANY chairlifts leading up to the slopes...some of them right from the village centre.
So up we got, and got in our first 1/2 day ski...plenty of getting our snow-legs back, but luckily this time I didn’t break anything! (though I did fall off a T-Bar twice which was pretty embarrassing!).
Took a late lunch break in one of the Bavarian pubs handily located at the bottom of the ski run we were on, and had a nice feed of traditional Austrian Spag Bol.
Perhaps it's at this point I should mention the music.
oh
my
god
Picture that "Barbie Girl" song....add in Piano Accordians and sing-along chorus groups.
Now play that over and over and over and over and over again ,just with slightly different beats and / or (but not necessarily!) lyrics.
90% of the people around the Village were German or at least Germanic (ie Austrian), and it turns out, this is the music they think is currently cool!...
Anyways, back on the slopes to finish the day off, grab some good Austrian tucker for dinner (crumbed meat and leafy vegetables etc...), and off to catch up on missed sleep.
Woke up the next morning to the most Beautiful day!
(the view from out our window on Sunday morning)
Slept in a wee bit (as the lifts don’t start till 10AM), another hearty Austrian meal to start us off , and another great day on the slopes.
Well, ok, actually, we were both raggedly exhausted by lunch time! .. we aren’t as fit as we were last year ..I guess all that skiing and ice skating in Toronto did actually do something!...
We gamely ski'd on however and finally knocked it on the head at 4 giving us enough time to return our gear, get changed, grab our shuttle and be back in Salzburg by 8PM for our flight.
Miraculously, everything actually went to plan and we made it back to London fine!
Was truly a great weekend despite the small hiccup of not actually booking any accommodation (oops...our bad).
We've been pretty much head down working since then till now.....am starting to get the bug again though, and Caren is in the throws of organising our next weekend away somewhere...I "think" she's talking either Spain or Denmark, but haven't really been paying much attention yet ;)
Ok, so, now we're only about 2 - 3 months behind!. not bad!!!
Things are going well...finally had out first Sunny day today (Saturday 22nd April)..
Was quite a laugh walking down to Clapham highroad to see the HUNDREDS if not thousands of people with picnic blankets/hammocks etc.. out on Clapham Common ...wish I'd had the camera...
If the weather holds we're off up to Hampstead Heath tomorrow, supposed to be a nice spot..
Anyways, in feb we took a quick sneaky weekend away to Austria for some skiing / snowboarding.
We headed off Friday afternoon out to Standstead airport for the cheap flight option.
Quick hop in the Ryan Air air-taxi service ( "that'll be £30 thank you sir") and we were in Salzburg ,Austria.
...land of the Governator..
A bit of a wait in the airport for our Shuttle out to Saalbach-Hinterglemm , which is the name given to the area we were staying in..
The reason it has a bit of a strange double name is it's actually 2 Villages quite close to each other within a valley surrounded by ski mountains.
As we were waiting it started to snow, which was great since there hadn’t been much snow till then over the last few weeks, and conditions weren't that great for skiing...
We finally found our Shuttle bus guy and headed off towards Saalbach-Hinterglemm in the snow..
And, my god, did it snow! ...30CM's that night right over the are we were skiing!..allright!
...anyways, getting ahead of myself....So, it was about a 3 hour drive in a Blizzard from Salzburg, the likes of which we hadn’t seen since....well, last year in Niagara...but still, it was a lot of snow!
Lucky for us, Caren had managed to retain a lot of her schoolgirl German, and was able to converse fairly well with the driver who had no english, and he told us he hadn't seen snow this heavy in many years. Very friendly chap, full of great old stories that we could only understand 1 out of every 5 words of!
..and so we arrived at the Village, and were dropped of...it was 12 Midnight by that stage and the Village was utterly silent, the blanket of fresh and falling snow deadening any stray sounds, leaving only the crunching of our snowboots and the echoes of our foggy breathing as we made our way up the steep road towards our accommodation; too steep for the shuttle bus to traverse in the heavy snow.
...and here we ran into our first problem...the place was shut!
"Hmm" we thought .. Here we are at midnight, in the middle of a blizzard, in a completely closed up village where very few people are likely to speak english!
So we hammered on the door of the Chalet/Hotel for about 10 minutes..
Finally the proprietor came down (in his Undies) to see what the racket was....we did our best attempt at explaining in German, but it obviously wasn’t good enough, as he went to get his english speaking wife out of bed (lol).
“So”, we explained "we have a booking" , to which she replied "no you don't, we're full!"
"Hmmm"
So that was trouble...However, luckily for us the blizzard had meant one booking hadn’t been able to show up that night, and so, in a show of Austrian hospitality (which, it turns out, is quite easy to find!) , she let us have the room, and even let us have it for the discounted rate we believed we booked it at.
So, we hit the sack, a bit worse for wear, and a bit miffed that we'd have to find a new place to stay in the morning rather than go skiing! ...but what the hell, at least we were there and the snow was Fantastic!
(The Hotel Astrid, our first night accommodation...snow still falling the next morning!...)
Next morning we had a hearty breakfast, and humped out gear down to the Village centre to look for the tourist info centre.
It was all very clearly signposted (typical German efficiency, although god help you if you call them German!) , and we soon had new accommodation sorted...a 10 min Bus ride up the valley to our new place.
Ok, so, finally, sorted!...off to rent our gear and get up the slopes!
(Us walking up the village centre looking for the Info centre)
There was certainly no shortage of ski rental places, and we soon had Ski's (for Caren) and a Board (for me) sorted.
The cool thing about this area is that its a great big long valley, and ALL along it there is a free bus's that do circuits between the MANY chairlifts leading up to the slopes...some of them right from the village centre.
So up we got, and got in our first 1/2 day ski...plenty of getting our snow-legs back, but luckily this time I didn’t break anything! (though I did fall off a T-Bar twice which was pretty embarrassing!).
Took a late lunch break in one of the Bavarian pubs handily located at the bottom of the ski run we were on, and had a nice feed of traditional Austrian Spag Bol.
Perhaps it's at this point I should mention the music.
oh
my
god
Picture that "Barbie Girl" song....add in Piano Accordians and sing-along chorus groups.
Now play that over and over and over and over and over again ,just with slightly different beats and / or (but not necessarily!) lyrics.
90% of the people around the Village were German or at least Germanic (ie Austrian), and it turns out, this is the music they think is currently cool!...
Anyways, back on the slopes to finish the day off, grab some good Austrian tucker for dinner (crumbed meat and leafy vegetables etc...), and off to catch up on missed sleep.
Woke up the next morning to the most Beautiful day!
(the view from out our window on Sunday morning)
Slept in a wee bit (as the lifts don’t start till 10AM), another hearty Austrian meal to start us off , and another great day on the slopes.
Well, ok, actually, we were both raggedly exhausted by lunch time! .. we aren’t as fit as we were last year ..I guess all that skiing and ice skating in Toronto did actually do something!...
We gamely ski'd on however and finally knocked it on the head at 4 giving us enough time to return our gear, get changed, grab our shuttle and be back in Salzburg by 8PM for our flight.
Miraculously, everything actually went to plan and we made it back to London fine!
Was truly a great weekend despite the small hiccup of not actually booking any accommodation (oops...our bad).
We've been pretty much head down working since then till now.....am starting to get the bug again though, and Caren is in the throws of organising our next weekend away somewhere...I "think" she's talking either Spain or Denmark, but haven't really been paying much attention yet ;)
posted by Craig R at
9:44 pm
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