Skiing is booked - finally!

Well, I've finally booked my ski trip for Feb now anyway. I say "finally" because 2 weeks ago I mailed one of the lads to see what the story was with the ski trip, only to get a reply that said "Dude! Were you not cc'd on that?". Seems everyone else organized and booked everything at the beginning of September, but someone forgot to include me on the mailing list! So, I've spent the last 2 weeks teasing out the flight/accommodation details that have already been booked and trying to find myself something similar. At least this year's trip is earlier than last year, the beginning rather than the end of Feb (31st Jan -> 7th Feb), but seems to be a bit more scattered in terms of planning: the destination is the same for everyone (Zermatt in Switzerland) but there seems to be 3 separate airports in 2 countries that ppl are flying into. I managed to get the same flights as some of the lads but after that we have a 3hr train journey to Zermatt, and I didn't manage to get the same accommodation.

What makes the return trip awkward is that the flight back is at 9am on the sat from Zurich, which means either getting up at stupid AM from Zermatt (like the first 2 trips) or leaving Zermatt on the fri evening and staying overnight in Zurich. Problem I found was that I could book a 7-day stay (sat-sat) with almost no problems but a 6-day (sat-fri) was over €200 dearer! So I went for the 7-day option and will figure out closer to the time what I'll do about getting to the airport.

Now all I need to do is book my gear.....

Some more pics of the ski trip in austria

...courtesy of Clement

Skiing in the dark

On our last night, Eugene, the Irish guy whose place we were staying in, decided we were going to start drinking up at the middle station and then drink our way down the mountain. He took a bit of a shine to us I think, because he was on a leave of absence from CIE and there were two of the guys in the group from there, so we got maybe preferential treatment to other groups (including the discount on the boots) :-) He knew a little gasthaus that hardly any of the tourists ever went, which was on a blue run off to the side of the final run down to the village (which incidentally was a black run), if you didn't know about it you'd miss it every time. So, the plan was to drink a bit, ski a bit, drink a bit more, ski a bit more and end up in there at around 5pm for dinner and more drinks. The dinner was absolutely fantastic - roast pork, roast potatoes and dumplings, probably the best meal we got in the whole trip! After the meal there was a bit of a singsong, and we wound that up around 9pm. Then came the interesting part: the only way back to the village was to ski down. A black slope. In the dark. With about 5, 6 pints on everyone. Fun! The only light we had was from a piste basher a bit up the slope. Strangely enough, it was probably some of the best skiing most ppl did: if you can't see the black slope, you can't be scared by the fact you're skiing down a 75- or 80-odd degree angle, and the alcohol got rid of any residual nerves anyone had! Everyone made it down with no injuries at all, even the beginner skiiers. So, for future reference, the best way to tackle a black slope is half cut :-)

Nocturnal events: apres-ski in Zell.

Well, no-one goes on a ski holiday to ski, that'd just be silly. The nightlife is as much of an attraction as the slopes, and I've known ppl who've spent more time on the piss than on the piste!

We started off quite well, with the Ireland V Scotland and England V France matches in the Irish pub pretty much as soon as we arrived. The forst match went well, but then we hit an uncomfortable situation for the second match: for Ireland to have a chance at the Grand Slam, France had to lose, so we had to shout for England. Alcohol helped numb that particular pain, and the night ended well apart from the very end: the trek up to the guesthouse. We were staying about 300m up the mountain from the village and the slope up to it was nearly steeper than anything we had to ski! Walking back up there was often more knackering at the end of the day than anything else we'd done earlier.

As the week went on, we took the measure of all of the alcohol serving establishments in the village. The irish bar we tried to avoid, as, well, it was an irish bar and there's too many of them at home. A few of the guys had been in Zell a few years before and had fond half-memories of a bar called "Deiler", but this year that seemed to always be full of 17- and 18-year-old dutch kids and you nearly felt like a paedophile just looking at the dancefloor. The music was brutal as well, so we abandoned that place for a bar called "Crazy Daisys", which didn't always hit the spot music-wise (this is a ski resort in austria I guess, their taste in music died with Mozart) but had a better atmosphere. And once that place shut at 4am, there was always Viva, which was a shite club that only played techno music but stayed open serving alcohol til the last person left or 8am, whichever happened first.

So, there were quite a few mornings where we weren't quite able to catch the first chairlift of the morning at 8:30 :-)

Skiing without snow (nearly)

I remember on my first year skiing I had a bit of trouble adjusting to having to walk around in the village on that cold white "snow" stuff; on our way to the pub the first night and for the few days afterwards I was slipping and sliding all over the shop until I got my "snow legs". I needn't have worried about it this year. Once again, we arrived into a snowless ski resort. It was a little bit better than Kitzbuhel last year in that you could ski all the way down to the village, but only just about better. The day we arrived there wasn't even any attempt to get on the white stuff though, as it was just about getting dark when we arived and there was an ireland match to be watched anyway (strangley enough, same as last year!).

We had just about enough time before the match to get sorted out with gear, and I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a pair of ski boots. Last year, I'd been looking at the sales in the Great Outdoors in Dublin and at the end-of-season clearance sale the boots were down to about €300. Here, the boots started at about €250 and even then I got them reduced to €150 because there were a few of us getting them together and because the shop owner had a deal with the guy we were staying with. So, €150 for a pair of boots I'll wear maybe one week a year, am I mad? No, paying €400 for a pair you'll wear one week a year, that's mad! ;-p

So, sunday morning we headed up the ski slopes. Straight away, we noticed something. It was warm. very warm. Too bloody warm in fact! Normally when you go skiing, you get the expensive ski jacket and pants for a reason: the temp is normally in the minus figures. Minus 5 degrees is nice weather for skiing, anything lower is maybe a bit chilly. Here tho, it was plus 5 degrees - at 9am! By early afternoon, I'd seen a thermometer on one of the ski lifts reading an air temp of 15 degrees! This was nice in one way as you could ski in just your base layer or a fleece instead of being wrapped up like an arctic explorer (altho you couldn't lose the ski pants which got a bit toasty), but bad in that the snow conditions got messy real fast in the afternoon. High temps and lots of ppl sking combined to make the slopes pretty slushy and bumpy by about 2pm, and there were no piste bashers in evidence around to smooth things out again. By later afternoon, some of the slopes were less ski runs and more obstacle courses as you had to navigate around bumps and moguls that had been carved out gradually during the day.

This unfortunately was somehting that didn't change as the week went on: it got a bit cooler but never went below zero during the day, which meant that they couldn't use the snow cannons to make more snow (it needs to be below zero for that to work). Add to that the fact that we pretty much didn't see any snow falling on Zell til the last run of the last day (and even then only on the top of the mountain, any lower than 2000m and it was rain) meant that the snow we had at the start of the week was the snow we were stuck with til the end of the week. The mornings were ok, as the snow had a chance to refreeze overnight and hte piste bashers went in after it got dark, but by the afternoons it was a slushfest again. The worst run was on the last day, a 1km(ish) red run down to the village which by the time we went on it was just pure muck to ski on. Was as much ice and slush as actual snow, you couldn't turn worth shit, was bumpy as feck and even the experienced skiiers with us were wiping out. Everyone was knackered and soaked by the time we got the whole way down.



Then again, it could have been worse. I feel sorry for anyone who was arriving on the day we left - it was pissing rain all morning and as we were dropping our gear off in the shop the assistant told us they were after closing all the lifts as the ski conditions were just so bad - and this was just before lunch! So, if you arrived in Zell on the 1st March, I hope you were into hill-walking 'cos you sure as shit weren't going to be doing any skiing!

Getting there is NOT half the fun!

Well, I'm just back from my ski trip in Austria. Next time we go on a ski trip, I think I'm definitely going to try to convince the lads to fly into the same country as we're actually skiing in! To get to Zell Am See in Austria, we flew into Munich in Germany. I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning to catch an 8:30am flight. Normally I don't mind doing that if I'm going somewhere on the far side of the globe, but Germany? You're barely out of your own timezone there, is way to early in the morning to be doing that! The majority rules tho, and in our group, the majority said we fly early :-

The plan was to get to Munich at around 11:30, hop on the bus we'd hired for a "quick" 2 1/2 hour trip to Zell, settle in and have a couple of hours to spare before we headed down to the irish bar to watch the Ireland Scotland rugby match at 7 to grab our gear, get some food and generally settle in. What we didn't realise before we set out tho was that the week we were going coincided with mid-term break in Holland, and it seems if you're Dutch, the thing to do on mid-term is to head to Austria skiing. So, the whole of Holland seemed to be heading in the same direction as us, the autobahns were choc-a-block with NL-plated cars, and at one stage on the radio we heard there was a 16km long tailback outside Munich! Luckily our bus driver knew the score,and we spent the whole trip on back-roads and side-roads, seeing a lot more of rural Germany than normal tourists do (and I can see why they don't bother with it). The only time we got on the autobahn we took 20mins to get 1km between intersections! So, what on a normal day would have been a nice easy 2, maybe 2 1/2hr trip turned into a 3 1/2hr odyssey.

On our way back, we discovered that Newton's 1st law also applies to traffic: just as for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, so for every mass Dutch migration to the ski slopes there is an equal and opposite mass migration home at the end of the week. And once again we got caught in the middle of it. At least on the way out we didn't really have a deadline to keep, but on the way back we had a flight to catch! So, we arranged for the bus to pick us up way way in advance of what we thought we'd need - 1:45pm for a 7:40pm flight. This time though, some of our tulip-growing pot-smoking cousins seem to have gotten wise to the fact that the autobahn was a recipe for creeping disaster, and so transferred some of the traffic jams and tailbacks onto some of our back roads. It also didn't help that there'd been a big-ass storm the night before so a lot of the roads the driver was planning on taking were blocked by fallen trees, forcing us to take detours. As a result, we arrived at Munchen airport just in time to catch the tail end of the check-in queue! At least we made it I guess.

Having said that, we could have easily taken our time a bit more. I read a statistic somewhere the other week saying that on average about 30% of flights take off late from the major european airports, and this was one of our chances to add to those statistics. We started boarding at about the time we should have been taking off, which is generally par for the course on any flight, but then when we were all nice and comfy and had buckled up and noted the location of our nearest emergency exits (bearing in mind that the nearest exit may be behind us) and ready to go..... nothing. We get an announcement from the cockpit that we'd lost our take-off slot and had to wait for the tower to give us another one - which would be at least a half-hour delay. Half an hour later(ish), we started moving, and eventually got into the air, where we immediately seemed to hit a headwind which stayed with us most of the way over. As a result, what should have been a 9:30pm landing into Dublin turned into an 11:15pm one, and I crawled into my flat just after midnight.

Next year, if we're going to Italy, we fly into Italy and not Switzerland 'cos the flight happens to be €40 cheaper!

Skiing without much snow (pt. 3)

On our last day of skiing, we all managed to get together in a big group, with everyone there, for the first time in the holiday! It didn't last any longer than the first run of the day tho, as the girls who'd just graduated from beginners class didn't want to tackle anything harder than a few blue slopes, while trhe rest of us wanted to head over to another mountain where we hadn't been yet, at the far sie of the valley. The only way to get there was by cable car, right across the valley so we decided to head up to it. Unfortunately, as we wound our way up on the chair lift, what we thought had just been cloud at the top of the mountain turned out to be a full-fledged blizzard! The visibility was down to maybe 10 meters, the temp was about -15 with wind-chill factored in, and the snow was being driven horizontally into out faces. At that stage we decided to cut our losses and just go back down on the slopes we'd been on before. On the way though, we found the entrance to a run we'd been looking for before but had always managed to miss, and despite the fact that it had a big "closed" sign on it, we decided to try it anyway. It was probably the best run of the day, as we had it all to ourselves and were pretty much running on fresh undisturbed snow. After a (really) big lunch, we decided to try a few red runs before meeting the others again, and I was quite pleased with myself that I only fell twice (one was silly tho - crossed my skis on a flat bit!). After that we decided to call it a day, as everyone was a bit weary, so we started heading for the Hannenkamm lift. This involved taking a chairlift and two more blue runs though, and at this stage the weather had closed in again and visibility was back down to bout 5m - fun!

We made it back alive anyway and then headed down to meet the girls who had some sort of medals presentation thing from their ski school to go to, from some race they'd done on their last day (none of them had won tho I think!). After a drink or two in the pub, we all agreed to meet back up and have dinner in that place the lads had had the orgasmic steak in on tues night. So, after showerng, shaving etc, we all met up. Pretty much everyone ordered the same thing (the prawns for starter, then the steak) except for me - I hate prawns, and at the last second I had a fit of contrariness and decided against the steak. Judging by the silence around the table when the mains arrived out, a good meal was had by all, and after we set about the task of finding a good bar to park ourselves in for the night. Unfortunately, our first chouce was not the best one - a trendy cocktail bar full of the beautiful people, all dolled-up in thir friday finery - so naturally a big crowd of loud irish in ski outfits stood out like a sore thumb! We only stayed there for two drinks, then headed out to look for somewhere slightly better. We got distracted along the way by an outside bar where they were playing this game where you hammer a nail into a block of wood with the narrow chisel end of a hammer. Your strike had to begin with the hammer touching the edge of the block tho, so it wasn't as easy as it sounds. After a good few games of this we realised (a) it was nearly 1am and the bar was closing and (b) we had to be up early the next day to catch the taxi to the airport, so we called it a night.

The next day dawned bright and early - too damn early! We were getting a 7:30am pickup for the airport, so had to be up at 6:30am. Naturally the discussion in the taxi on the way to the airport was minimal, and we only really were waking up when we got into Munich. Checking in was uneventful, right up to the point where the girl at the check-in counter told em I had to queue up again to pay for my bags - damn Aer Lingus and their charging per bag policy! The guy at the Aer Lingus desk seemed to have had a serious attack of the slows just before I got there - there were only 4 people in the queue ahead of me, but it still took him 35mins to deal with them! And all of this for an €8 fine that had I known in advance, I could have paid online and saved myself all the hassle! At this stage the others had already gone through security, and by the time I reached them I didn't even have time to get food before we took off! Needless to say I was slightly a bit miffed at this. The flight itself passed uneventfully, apart from a pretty hard landing in Dublin, and so we all went our separate ways, probably never to see each other again until the next time we go skiing.

So, all in all, definitely not a leisure holiday, but a damn good one anyway!

Skiing without much snow (pt. 2)

Day three dawned with a lot more promising weather conditions than the previous two - both in terms of snow on the ground (lots) and snow in the air (none). Lessons were actually pretty productive today - the group was down to seven so things went a lot faster. This was a good thing, since we'd only signed up for 3 days lessons and the previous 2 had been fairly unproductive on our eyes! We were supposed to be going to another slope but it was apparently closed so back to the Horn it was for us!

We started off the morning by doing the run from the top of the cable car to the middle station. The run was quite nice, blue all the way, and it pretty much reminded me of the "home run" into the village in Sol, but a bit shorter. Seeing as we were with Walter (the instructor) tho, and he was going slow to make sure everyone could keep up, it took a bit of time to go down, so after lessons in the afternoon me and 3 of the guys decided to do it a bit faster. Took about 30mins the first time, we did it in about 10 by ourselves! Only problem is, the 2nd time down, we sort of ended up losing someone - we were certain he was right behind us. Ah well, I'm sure he was ok...

After getting back to the hotel, showering, changing etc, we decided to go out to a restaurant that one of the lads had had a drink in the night before when we were out playing pool. Was a fancy looking italian place, with one problem - the menu was in german and italian, but no english! Luckily I had some italian and the waiter had good english! I made a bit of a tactical error in my choices - for starter I picked "parmagiana", expecting flaked parmesan over a salad or something, but I forgot that in an austrian restaurant, what you see on the menu is exactly what you get - so I ended up wit lumps of raw parmesan cheese! Now, I like parmesan (I wouldn't have ordered it otherwise), but not on its own and not in the quantity given! My main course was nice, veal (with a hint of parmesan from my overloaded tastebuds), but going by the semi-orgasmic sounds coming from beside me from Evelyn, the steak was even nicer!

After a really nice dinner, we wandered out to try to find a decent lively pub, and then someone spotted a fateful sign outside a place called "The Pub" - "KARAOKE HERE TONIGHT". So, despite the misgivings of some of us, we all headed in. naturally no-one wanted to go up first, so we all shoved a fiver into a kitty for the first person to go up. Once everyone had thrown down, one of the girls said she loved karaoke and was going to go up anyway, but she'd take the money thank you very much! So, alcohol was consumed and much merriment was had, and come more singing actually happened as well. Unfortunately, there were quite a few locals singing local songs as well (or german songs anyway), which were pretty bloody awful! Then again, they like David Hasselhoff in germany too....

Weds was our first "real" day of skiing - we had no lessons and were finally going up the Hannenkamm with Doyley and Clem. The conditions in the morning were pretty bad tho, it was OK on the higher slopes but once you got to mid-mountain, it was raining! Whatever about blizzards, rain is awful to ski in - it turns the snow to slush, which makes it pretty damn hard to turn, and your goggles are useless 'cos they don't have windscreen wipers. By the time we stopped for lunch, we were literally steaming - we were so soaked by the rain and so hot from having to work so hard at turning, there was steam coming off us once we took off our jackets! The afternoon went pretty well tho, whizzing down blue slope after blue slope, and I even managed my first black! Ok, it was a fairly short one, but still, a black is a black. Only fell on my ass a few times, which was pretty good I thought. As the lads said tho, "if you're not falling, you're not going fast enough!"

After the skiing for the day was over, and everyone gathered in the usual watering spot, we decided to head down to a bar called the Londoner, where there was a live band on. This was the liveliest place we'd found so far, so we sort of ended up not bothering to go back and change, or go out and eat. As a result we were pretty well hammered by about 10 - hey, drinking for 5hrs on an empty stomach will do that to you. I even ended up chatting up some chick, which is not something I normally do on a night out (she was irish and all - go figure, I go to austria to hit on an irish girl!). Around 10:30 a few people got the munchies so we wandered out to see what we could get to eat. Unfortunately, the nearest place to get food was McDonalds, but hey, needs must when the devil drives.... We were slightly surprised when we got in to find that they had prawns on the menu. I privately was questioning the advisability of ordering prawns in McDonalds, and in a land-locked country like Austria at that, but Doyley was all gung-ho for it, and apparently they weren't too bad. That bout of gastronomic adventuring tho pretty much paid to our night.

Thursday was our 2nd last day of skiing, and it had pretty much snuck up on us rather fast. I didn't have the best of mornings, in that I managed to both break my shades and lose one of my ski poles. Was silly really, I was going up on one of the chair-lifts, took off my glove to get something out of my pocket and didn't realise that the pole strap was looped around the glove rather than my wrist. I didn't really miss it when going downhill - you don't really use your poles all that much really, altho you do feel a bit unbalanced with just one - but I definitely missed it on the level or when trying to go up a slope. One ski pole makes for a lot of damned hard work pulling yourself up a hill! The worst thing was, I knew exactly where it was, and could even see it every time we took that particular lift back up (which we did a few times), but couldn't get to it. I was expecting to lose my deposit or something at the end of the day when I went to get a replacement, but the girl in the shop just said "ok, go pick out another one there, we'll pick up that one in the spring". Fair enough!

Tat night, me, Doyley, Clem and Fran decided to split off from the group and try out a restaurant that Gar had told us himself and the missus had been in. We went in, and were told we'd be waiting at leat a half an hour. We elected to stay at the restaurant's bar and wait, and even before the first pints had settled in the glasses, the maitre'd was back asking us did we mind sharing. Seems a table of 8 had just come free, and coincidentally a group of english blokes had also arrived looking for seats. They turned out to be good gas, and much fun and entertainment was had, to the extent that it was close to midnight when we rolled out of the place. The others had hit the irish bar in the meantime, so we had to head down and try to catch up with them in the alcohol stakes. Never let it be said that we turned down a challenge! ;-)

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!

Ski gear sorted!

Well, I finally have all my ski stuff sorted out. I just went on the interweb and rented my ski gear. So, all I have to do is go up to the shop when we arrive, wave my receipt at them and collect my stuff. And I get 20% off through booking online! Seems to be my week of getting cheap stuff - went in yesterday to the ski shop where Deco's girlfriend works and she cut me a deal on some stuff, gave them to me at cost price! So, picked up a pair of goggles and a new fleece for €45! Between that and the el cheapo ski suit I picked up last year in Beiing, makes for a slightly cheaper than usual ski trip!

Now all I have to do is turn up at the airport with it all on time....

The forecast doesn't look the best tho - no new snow in the last week?

Ski jacket, not a rain jacket.

Well, I'm just after discovering something rather annoying about my chinese ski jacket. While I was already after finding out that it wasn't really breathable (sort of important in a ski jacket when you're sweating up on the slopes), I now know as well that it isn't the best thing in the world either for wet weather. I was walking home from work and about half-way in along Amien St the heavens opened on me. Now, the jacket mostly seems ot be waterproof, but "mostly" isn't really enough, and soon enough I found the chink in the armour, teh achilles heel, or in this case the achilles armpit. The problem is that the sleeves unzip to turn it into more of abody-warmer, and the two zips on the arms don't quite meet flush underneath the arm. So, the rain was able to get in the gap. Got home and my arms were soaking.

So, now I know that while it may be prety warm in the cold and it's snow-going abilities are yet to be proven, it's definitely not the thing for the rain!

Away from home again.

Well, looks like I'm off travelling again. I'm just after booking 4 days in Brussels again, over to see my friend Sara there. This seems to be becoming an annual event - am flying the 14th and back on the 18th of december. Will probably be the first real test of my ski jacket!

I decided this time not to go with Ryanair like I usually do, despite them being the cheapest option. With Ryanair, I could have gotten the trip for €20 return including taxes (or €9 less than it costs me to go home to Waterford for the weekend), and with Aer Lingus it was €75 - €58 of which is tax! So I'd almost be paying as much after tax with Ryanair as before tax with Aer Lingus. Once you include though the "transfer fee" to and from the airport at €10 and 50min-1hr each way, the differnece gets to be a bit smaller - with Aer Lingus I'm flying into Brussels itself (Zaventem airport) not some dipshit little town in the south of the country (no offence intended to anyone from Charleroi who's reading, but....), and it's 20min and about €2 for the train in to Midi! Besides, the last time I flew Ryanair to Brussels I had a 2hr delay on the way out and a 4 1/2hr delay on the way back, so I think it's time to give someoen else a chance.

I've also gotten off my ass finally about the ski trip on February. I'm heading off to Kitzbuehl in Austria with some friends, the 24th feb to the 3rd March. Shgould be a good laugh, altho we still have to figure out such minor things as transport from teh airport to the ski resort, accommodation etc..... ;-)