Saturday - the snow

Waking early, I threw all my stuff into bags, took my leave of Heinrich and HK and moved down the hill to Peter, and Haus Pateriol (HP, from now on). This place is a real cut above. It’s fantastic. It’s more expensive, as you’d expect, being much nearer to town, and with a higher standard of décor and facility. So, having dumped my belongings in their ‘ping-pong’ room, I headed off down the hill. Earlier, I’d received a call from Ruari. Dunc missed his connection. Of course he did. Spent three hours on a train platform in the middle of the night, and eventually made it to St. A at 10am, fully refreshed and raring to go. Or almost. With just twenty metres to the main lift, all dressed and equipped for skiing…he stopped for a gluewein, naturally.

So, I Sherp’d (A verb of my own devising – from Sherpa – I sherp, he sherps, they are sherping, etc.) for Ruari and Dunc. There wasn’t a lot of visibility, but the snow was good, and it was lots of fun, providing one kept one’s knees bent to absorb the bumps. Handily enough, Dunc and Ruari both wore black and red. It seems to be an unwritten rule for gentlemen skiing in pairs in St. Anton to wear red and black, and more than once, I was distracted from watching the two of them make their way down the slopes, by a shout from Dunc, who was already twenty metres in front of me. We spent the rest of the morning playing around on the slopes down to the Zammermoosbahn quad, pausing every-so-often for me to answer phone calls from Chris. Is it me, or what?! I give people the name of the place they’re staying, and good directions (my journal, shut up), and they still can’t find the place.

Anyway, we paused for lunch at the top of Galzigbahn (spag bol number twenty-four of my stay, I believe), and waited for Chris (new ski pants. Canary Yellow. ‘Nuff said), Abs (does a lot of sit-ups, you see), Ben (six and a half feet of silly grin) and Reon (why do today what you can put off…indefinitely) to arrive. This, they duly did, amid much tears and laughter (mainly over the yellow pants).

The visibility worsened. We ploughed around for a while, with everybody enjoying their first time on snow for a while, while I looked on like the gnarled and weather-beaten local I am. With conditions worsening, we headed down to the Anton bar, at the bottom, where everyone else had begun partying.