Skiing without much snow (pt. 1)

Well, I'm back from my Ski trip, mostly in one piece! I ache in muscles I didn't know I had, I have a bruised knee, a wrenched shoulder, I broke my oakley shades and my liver is threatening to take out a restraining order against me, so yeah, was a great trip! :-P

Unfortunately, it didn't get off to a very auspicious start. We booked our flights way back in november, back before we knew the 6 nations timetable. So, by a sheer case of bad luck, we were taking off on saturday the 24th, landing in Munich at 5:30 - or just as Ireland v. England was kicking off in Croke Park. This would have been ok, but we still had a 2 1/2hr taxi ride to go to get to Kitzbuhel! So, we were on the road for the whole match. Luckily Vodafone were doing a "free txt" day, so we were getting txt updates for pretty much every kick of the match from one of the guys back home. Still tho, not the same as not seeing the match! What made it even worse though was that fact that the closer we got to the mountains, the more snow we didn't see. According to the taxi driver, it hadn't snowed there in 2 weeks! We got all the way to Kitzbuhel without seeing any more snow than you'd see in Ireland in your average winter, and the town itself was completely snowless. We were joking with each other that we'd have to find the local mountain bike rental, or buy 2 skateboards and strap one to each foot!

We checked into our respective hotels anyway, and headed out in the rain (for at that point it had indeed started raining) to Flanagans, the Irish bar where we were supposed to be meeting up with a few more of the gang. After suffering though their fairly inebriated description of what a bloody brilliant match we'd missed, we headed out to find some grub. We stumbled across a mexican place called 'La Fonda', which coincidentally contained two more of our group who were staying a bit further out of town and so hadn't joined us in the pub. This brought our motley crew up to 13, so much food and drink was had for the remainder of the night until we took the subtle hints of the staff (i.e. stacking the chairs up on the tables around us) and left about 1:30ish.

The next morning we were up bright and early to get our skis etc and sign up for ski school. We had 3 raw beginners, 3 intermediates (including myself) and the rest were "expert" - as in they'd been skiing for 5 or 6 years. Unfortunately by the time we got our gear sorted we were nearly late for school! The hotel was a nice easy 5min walk along the rail lines from the main cable car, the Hahnenkamm (which at various stages before we got the name right, we were calling the "heineken", the "mikka-hakkinen" or the "hasselhoff"), but the ski school was on another mountain, the Kitzbuhler Horn, which was a 5min bus journey away! The first day's skiing in class wasn't very spectacular, as we had a big group (14 ppl) and the instructor was really only feeling out how much we knew already. Also, the conditions weren't great - we'd only started seeing real snow about half-way up in the cable car, and even at the top there was only patchy snow off the pistes - some of the pistes were even closed. After lessons, we met up with the others sitting outside the hotel at the foot of the Hahnenkamm sipping beers (a place that sort of became "base camp" for the hol, as we always met there every evening!).

Once we met up with the everyone we decided to try out the apres-ski bar beside where we meet up. When we walked in we were hit with a wall of the best dodgy austrian apres-ski music, complete euro-crap (music in Austria sort of went downhill after Mozart died). The place was dark, loud and packed to the gills with people in sweaty smelly ski boots and suits necking back beers, gluhwein and jaegermeisters and listening to some of the worst tunes on the planet - everything apres-ski should be! After a good while of musical torture and watching 2 drunk chicks practically dry-hump each other on the dancefloor, we headed out for food (we found a pizza place called "Ali Babas" that did a kebab pizza! Had to try that!) and then to a bar that was showing the Ireland England match on TV, where we pretty much stayed for the night.

The snow conditions were skightly better on our 2nd day - a little bit too good in fact! It had been snowing most of the night, and when we got to the top of the mountain, it was still snowing with crap visibility. Our first run of the day was down a rather windy blue slope from the cable car to the foot of the baby slopes, and there was so much snow blowing in our faces that we were going down in a line and you couldn't see any more than 5 ppl in front of you. We were also the first down of the day, and the snow ploughs hadn't even levelled off the piste in some parts, so we weren't so much skiing as wading though 4-6 inches of snow! the weather cleared off after a bit, but at various stages during the day they shut down the t-lift as the visibility had closed in too far again to run it - the guys at either end couldn't see well enough to know if anyone had fallen and they had to stop it (which normally happens about once every 5-10mins normally!). We ended the day by doing the run from the top lift to the middle station - about half-way down the mountain. Reminded me a lot of the "home run" into the village in Sol, altho a bit shorter - you'd do it in maybe 20mins. After lessons, the 3 of us in the class pretty much had the mountain to ourselves so we decide to try to see how much speed you could get up on a few of the blue slopes and try to kill ourselves on a red.

Once we got back to "ground level", we headed straight for a bar that our ski instructor had told us was having a beer promo with 2 free kegs of beer. We arrived along about 5:30, or 30mins after it was supposed to have started, expecting all the free beer to be gone, as it would at home. We weren't at home tho - apart from a good few ski instructors, the place was practically deserted! The free beer lasted quite a while - maybe 4 more pints each, which was nice. At that stage we'd managed to wangle our way onto the pool table, where we managed to stay til about 10ish when Gar and Ev got beaten by a couple of kids! At that stage we reckoned it was time for food, so we staggered to an italian place where coincidentally we ran into the rest of the group! At that stage we were slightly, um, under the weather so I'm afraid the Risotto I ordered was wasted on me - but at least I wasn't falling asleep in my rockett salad like Fran!