I was looking forward to this, if only to see snow and feel like I really am in the right season, namely winter. Unfortunately, I arrived after dark, so saw almost nothing the first evening. However, when I woke up the next morning, I thre open my curtains to take in a great sight: snow AND sun!
We got ready and hit the slopes mid-morning. Having not skied in over 10 years, I wisely headed straight for the ski school to book a lesson. Since I could only get one at 3 PM, two of my friends kindly sacrificed their morning to stay with me on the nummy hill and teach me a few things. The first thing I discovered is that I didn't suck! Turns out the advances in technology and equipment more than made up for my absence from the hills, and I was now a better skier than I ever had been! :-)
A few hours later, we went to a chalet at the top of one peak for lunch. Even more fabulous view from there! And as the temperature was around +3, we sat outdoors for lunch.
After a late lunch, I took a chairlift back down (because I wasn't ready to attack that intermediate slope!) and went to take my lesson. All in all, it was a fantastic day in the snow and sun. By the time I got home, I figure I'd been outdoors about 7 1/2 hours, and skiing 4-5 hours. Can you anticipate the problem? After sitting around a few hours that evening, I got up to find out... I could barely walk! Problem! Oh well, nothing to do for it, so I went to bed and hoped for better the next day.
Next morning comes around, and I drag myself out of bed. Hmmm, I can see I won't be pushing it today. But I figured I could work some of the kinks out after a few runs. So off we went to a different peak, me ready to attack the first blue (beginner) hill.
First off, remember these slopes are much, much longer than anything I'd ever skied on. Secondly, there are two things that could interfere with my enjoyment of skiing (well, other than my horrible muscle pain):
1- I dislike going fast in general, I don't even like to toboggan.
2- I have a slight fear of heights.
OK, neither one of these is debilitating and I usually work around them relatively easily (hell, I even went paragliding once). But it turns out standing at the top of a steep hill with a couple of sticks attached to my feet and a couple more in my hands results in these two problems being magnified. A lot.
While I could manage those tolerably well on the blue slope, I wasn't having fun and stopped after 1.5 runs to wait for the rest of the group at our lunchtime meeting point. that was fine, I like to people watch, but I also watched the weather turn progressively uglier: grey, humid, cold, threatening skies.
After lunch, the weather was definitely not cooperating, and that on top of everything else made my decision easy: time to leave. I had been told by my friends that the chairlift that took us to the top of that hill would take me back down. This was good, as the slope leading to the bottom was a red (intermediate) run. Turns out they were wrong! So I thought, OK, you CAN actually ski, so just take it nice and slow and you can make it down. So I tried to go down the red, an unhappy, STEEP, icy-and-powdery-at-the-same-time run. Oh yeah, I was also completely alone on this run, not a skier in sight. And then uh oh, little fear of heights and speed suddenly turned into a dragon! It took me 30-45 minutes to get off the damn mountain, at times with real tears in my eyes.
Conclusion: vacation was fun, bunny hills were fun, actual skiing SUCKS!!! But I didn,t injure myself amd I can tick off "ski in the Alps" from my bucket list, so I consider the whole thing a success.
Mais la prochaine fois, je fais exclusivement du chalet! ;-)
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