A day skiing

Stupid me chose today as my first day of skiing this season - stupid as being perfectly sunny with blue skies and also being the weekend, it was very busy with many day trippers (who come from Zurich and lower down the valley). The queue to get the gondola from the village up the mountain was ridiculously long so we decided to go have a coffee and wait for the queue to diminish. The other alternative is to get up very early to take the first lift up at 8.15am but when on holiday getting up very early somehow is not that appealing!

I get nervous when it is busier than usual on the slopes, particularly when you have idiotic older kids who try to ski past you as fast as possible and as close to you as possible. I skied okay today but when I tell you that the best part of the day was bumping into some friends at lunch and chatting to them over lunch...well you can tell how I felt about the skiing! You have to constantly have your wits about you when it is busy - getting off the chairlift today I was sitting on the right but wanting to ski off to the left, and some other guys sitting on the left who wanted to go off to the right nearly crashed into me but luckily I managed to veer off to the right instead. Not so lucky for a friend of ours who had the same thing happen to him today and the consequent collision resulted in the same serious injury that Luke incurred when skiing last March. I look forward to the day we no longer have to ski in school holidays!

I managed to pause a while to watch these paragliders jumping off the mountain top and have fun finding a thermal to gently carry them down. Added some extras of the beautiful conditions today.

The forecast is for some snow tomorrow - I have already decided not to ski but to take it easy instead.