Sorry for the e-silence. Axel has been busy and I am dealing with a tempermental computer.
Last weekend, Valentine's Day weekend, Axel and I and 9 other people from ISU and associates, took off to Adelboden, Switzerland. This is about 3 hours from Strasbourg and in the Swiss-German part. We left at 6h30 am in hopes to get on the slopes by 10 am. What we didn't factor in, however, was the extreme disorganization of renting, the ski lifts, and the drive in a snow storm with summer tires. There were 3 cars in the convoy, two rentals with summer tires and 1 company car with rear-wheel drive. So what seemed like an easy slope to the parking lot ended up being a half-hour of trying again and again to get up the hill (we didn't make it and ended up parking about 100 m away from the parking lot). The rental place on the first day was relatively organized but were obviously not ready for more than 3 customers at a time, so as soon as we came in, chaos ensued. And then we realized we could save 5 euros if we waited until noon, so we did. What is interesting about the ski lifts is that they really don't expect you to hang out. Thus, there was nowhere to just sit and have your lunch while you waited to get on a chair at a cheaper rate.
Here we are going up the gondola! These are videos for my friend Paggy, who had a bad mishap and broke her ankle. She has been at home for over a month now and Ax and I make her a video every day.
We all went up the chair until we got to the top, and that's when we realized that we had 1 person in our group who couldn't get down a hill in skis. So a quick 5 minute ski to the "real" chair lift (where the top peak was) took over 30 minutes with people stopping to wait for people who were waiting for our friend who ended up taking off her skis and taking the chair back to the rental shop to find lessons. The other reason for the delay was that a second person in our group had skied only a couple of times in a very flat part of Beijing, so he wasn't surviving very well. So by the time we got to the bottom of the second chair, we were 9.
Here are some pictures going up chair 2.
And here is the top of chair 2.
So already we realized how ridiculous it was to try and stay together, so we figured our real first run will be our last one together before we separate to our skill levels. Then we went down the first part of the run. This was a really steep part of the run but magnificent. And then...we lost another.
Erin made a bad turn and ended up in a pile with her skis still attached. This meant that she probably twisted her knee. Thankfully there was a ski hut which made raclette just down the hill, so Axel and Doug helped her get down.
James and Annemarie waiting with me at the bottom while Axel and Doug help Erin down the hill.
Real raclette!!!
And then the ski patrol came with the sled and took her away after inspecting her knee.
We're still not sure if it's torn or completely severed, but it's most likely her ACL or MCL (which is what I tore last ski season). Here is a video of her getting ready to be hauled down the hill.
And then, there were 3. James, Axel and I decided to make our way to a different part of the mountain...maybe to run away from the karma. We figured that Erin was our sacrifice to the ski gods in making the rest of the day fun. Here is our video for Paggy up the gondola after we lost Erin.
We ended up getting to a great part of the mountain where the runs were long and windy and there were hardly any people. Here's a not-so-interesting video of me going down a hill. I wish we took more of these but our hands were really cold and we just wanted to ski!!
We stayed overnight at a town near by called Frutigen.
The hotel was great...warm and clean and reasonably priced. And the view was spectacular. What was probably our smartest move on the trip was to take a bus back to Adelboden from Frutigen, rather than deal with our summer tires on the cars, even though there was no snow storm. We didn't know this but the rest of the hotel guests took their cars and were stuck in traffic to get to Adelboden for 2 hours! But what we gained by taking the bus, we lost by renting our equipment. The stereotype for the Swiss being super organized has been lost forever. While there weren't that many people getting rentals in the beginning, the lack of organization caused such chaos that by the time we got our equipment, it was noon! We could have driven back to Strasbourg and back to Switzerland instead of thinking that we would save time staying. Anyway, after much frustration, we all made it back on the slopes. Our first casualty from the day before had looked into lessons but no lessons were given on Sundays...so she rented a sled!!! This ended up being very good for me because I ended up with the most painful boots I've ever used so decided to make my way back to town to change them up, which meant skiing down with Doha, the sledder extraordinaire.
Here are some videos of her. Hilarious.
Some pictures in Adelboden. Axel will put up other pictures of the trip he'll get from the others once exams are over. Right now, he's in uber-stress mode.
