Having friends working for Contiki in Austria, I thought I could couple it with going to visit them. So I emailed my travel agent about spending two weeks skiing in Austria over my birthday. By the time I had booked it, I had talked myself down to one week (unsure if my body would survive two weeks, it wouldn't have) and from skiing to snowboarding. I thought that if I was going to spend a week up the mountain then I might as well learn something new. This turned out to be a good decision for another reason, as a couple of weeks before I left I fell down a flight of stairs and seriously hurt my knee. Thankfully snowboarding is a little more gentle on the knees than skiing.
So the time passed and suddenly I was on a train from York to take an overnight bus from London to Hopfgarten in the Austrian Tyrol.
Kings Cross station in London
We arrived in Austria about mid-afternoon (21hrs later) on my birthday and went straight to the gear rental place to get clothes, equipment and our lift passes. Once we got to Haus Schoneck we threw our bags in the rooms and hit the bar. That was followed by an welcome presentation and then a delicious dinner (all of the food we had there was delicious). After that everything is a bit black. Not really eating or drinking for 21hrs and then drinking alot in a short time can apparently lead to memory loss. I woke up on my bed not remembering anything that happened after dinner.
Still I was at breakfast at 7:30, ate heartily and took the 8:30 shuttle to the mountain to start my first day of being taught how to fall down a mountain on a single board rather than two sticks. For the next 5 days my mornings were fairly similar. Up at 7:30 on the snow by 8:35. I did five snowboarding lessons, which took me from not knowing how to attach it to my feet, to the final day where our instructor was teaching us how to do jumps and 180s (quite an impressive achievement). The lessons would take up the morning and then we would have lunch on the mountain before setting ourselves loose for the afternoon to practice what we had been taught in the morning.
My birthday wasn't the only event that happened while we were there. There was Australia day, a hosted "tight, white and bright" party, another birthday, a night time tobogganing trip, a couple of nights where we ate out and the opportunity to go night skiing. I opted out of the night skiing as I was already sore and tired enough for the day, but did the tobogganing trip. It was alot of fun and we went down a private path in the dark trying to push each other off the track into the powder.
We had amazing weather the entire time we were there. We had more snow in one night than they had all of last season. As it snowed every night, we got to board and ski on fresh powder every morning. Off piste there was untouched powder that you were riding through waist deep. The only down side was how hard it is to get yourself out when you fall over in it.
The final day was spent entirely on the slopes. Riding down trail after trail, just to catch the lifts to the start of the next one. It was bliss.
Eventually we had to leave. Another 20+ hour bus ride back to London. I had hoped to get off in Canterbury to visit people and make my own way home, but there had been snow down at the farm and the roads were a bit dangerous to drive on. So I had a couple of days in London, managed to eventually visit the Natural History Museum ( awesome place), before going back to York and work again.
Overlooking Hopfgarten from the baby slope
Our class (self-named the "shredlings")
View from the top restaurant
At the top of a black run
Swing made from an old chairlift
Outside Haus Schoneck
Stegosaurus in the Natural History Museum
