Skiing in Gstaad (It's Harder to Pronounce than it Looks!)
Another weekend, another opportunity to hit the slopes. This past Saturday we drove up to Gstaad (it's pronounced like Tony the Tiger says Great, instead of ending with "rate" end it with "staaaaaaaaad" like you do when the doctor asks you to open you mouth so he can have a look at your uvula), which is a ski-town about one and a half hours from our place. Gstaad is one of the bigger ski resorts we have been to so far, which enabled us to ski for quite a long time. We managed to ski for five hours (we did take a short break for lunch) and saw some beautiful alpine scenery. The nicest feature of Gstaad (at least in our minds) was the way it was designed. Most resorts you have to take multiple lifts to get to the peaks, and then you can only ski partway down. In Gstaad, you get to ride all the way up, and then all the way back down. This meant some killer thigh burning, but it was definitely worth it.
I would also rate most of their easy slopes as medium difficulty (at least compared to U.S. standards). We tried to go down a medium (or red) slope, which proved to be the downfall of Alli (literally). Neither of us are particularly fond of moguls, and yet this red run happened to be littered with them. I went down first and managed to make it past the worst of it unscathed (unless you count my new found ability to do the splits...), Alli on the other hand managed to wipe out pretty seriously. She knocked her ski goggles off, as well as one of her contact lenses when her ski pole crashed into her face as she fell to the ground. Thankfully she was ok as I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to climb all the way back up to where she was due to the incline. A helpful German asked Alli if she needed assistance (in German, of course), and she managed to shoo him away with her years of German training (she actually doesn't really know any German other than yes, no, please and thank you. So I think she basically told him "Nein, danke" or "no thank you"). Bruised but not broken (she also managed to find her contact and put it back in...), we continued on through what became "out of bounds" skiing to get back to the easier sections. You can tell when you are not where you should be when the cows start looking at you funny and you are actually skiing in someones back yard.
Karma would choose to manifest itself when I bit it not once, but twice in areas of the mountain where not even a three year old learning to ski should fall (although in my defense the second time I never stopped rolling and after skidding for fifty feet, I got back up and pretended nothing happened, except Alli witnessed it). We had a wonderful day, and can't wait until our next ski adventure. Hopefully the Alps will get some new snow this week as most of the resorts are starting to get a bit icy and crunchy, which makes for less than enjoyable conditions.
Post a Comment