My morning on the slopes had me ready to take the telepherique down after lunch and go shopping.
After taking Kaitlyn to ski school, where the instructor told me she didn’t particularly listen yesterday, Bill and I walked up to the building where you buy passes and get on the dangling car of death to go up the mountain… because I’m sure I noticed lockers there. At the very least, I wanted to be able to walk up in my regular boots and switch to ski boots there. Turns out, the lockers are for skis and ski boots (complete with heated boot holders. I know for certain they are heated because I grabbed one to find out and, yes, they are quite hot.) That locker is just enough for our skis, poles and boots at night and our regular snow boots during the day while we are on the slopes. It has to be the best 40 Swiss Francs we’ve spent on this trip.
I was anxious to show off to Bill all that I’d learned in my ski lesson yesterday afternoon. He started me off on a slope I know I skied yesterday, but facing it first thing this morning it seemed just too much. I made it down, albeit slowly. I was starting to warm up and feel a little better when my confidence took a nasty spill. The section of the mountain we’ve been skiing is served by t-bar butt lifts rather than chair lifts. On one that is particularly long my ski got twisted or something and down I went. In the middle of the lift with people being pulled up right behind me. Bill got himself off the bar and tried to help me as I literally dragged my way out of the path. That wouldn’t have been so horrible, but the people who were behind me were a pair of very rude snowboarders. In case I didn’t think what I’d done was quite stupid enough, they pointed and laughed at me. There are a few choice words that we’ve discovered are universal and both Bill and I used some of them then. Luckily for them, all snowboarders pretty much look the same to me because if we’d seen them again I think Bill would have knocked them down the mountain. He says it would have been worth getting kicked out of the resort for the satisfaction of doing so. Maybe he said that because he knew it wouldn’t really happen anyway. Finally, we worked our way back across the path and walked down a hill back onto the piste. The whole thing was really humiliating. I was ready to pack it in and just wander the town in the afternoon, so Bill could ski on his own without me dragging him down.
Instead of throwing in the towel, we headed for a break and some lunch. I talked Bill into taking a chair lift on his own to check out a blue run he thought looked good. It’s so hard to tell on the map because these are, without a doubt, the hardest blue runs I have ever seen. And here, blue is beginner. It’s a good thing I sent him up there alone. When he got off the lift, the sign said the blue run up there was closed. The only way down: a red run. I was sitting at the bar drinking a hot mulled wine (which took me several tries in two languages to order… neither of which was German which was a problem) when Bill called me and told me to look up to the top of the giant steep hill beside me. There he was waving. He was also up there with his camera, so I couldn’t take pictures of him whooshing down the red run.
With a boost from the wine, I put my skis back on and hit the slopes again with Bill. This time, I did much better. I even skied the long run that goes all the way down to the base of the resort. Turns out… it was actually a lot of fun.