lazyotter

Today I skied over two mountains all the way from Bad Hofgastein, down to Angertal and over to Bad Gastein. It was cool moving from place to place on ski’s and exploring loads of new runs in the process. I stopped for a nice coffee at Angertal and savoured it in the bright sunshine.

The snow on Stubnerkogel (2250m) - near Bad Gastein - seemed to be much better than on Schlossalm (2050m) and it was a joy not having to dodge as many moguls. The moguls have really been making things difficult for me as my turning still isn’t that great, and I keep going over the damn things instead of around them! And there seems to be loads of them here too, probably as lots of the soft snow is artificially created (especially lower down the mountain) and it’s quite busy, hence lots of people carving them out.

By the end of the day I was totally knackered, and I’ve also started to experience a longer than should be normal pain in my left ankle. It feels like something isn’t right with my boots which is making them hurt quite a lot. This was confirmed later in the evening when my left ankle was feeling quite bruised, and also my right knee a bit sore - I’d obviously been compensating with my right leg to take the pressure off my left. Not good.

Still to make up for things, I ate another excellent five course meal in my hotel.

I recently realised that we are now already well into the ski season and I still hadn’t organised anything. So last night (or rather very early this morning) I started my hunt to book some skiing for February. This proved to be extremely difficult, nigh on impossible in fact. I had originally wanted to go to Mont Tremblant in Canada (a country I have yet to visit), but despite me being completely flexible on dates, resort and cost, several hours trawling the web yielded no results. Next I tried Andorra (as I’d read somewhere there was a large skiing area all interconnected), but again no luck. By this time it was 2am this morning so I was forced to give up.

The most annoying thing was that as I was entering “1 adult” into all the holiday search engines (as I shall be going on my own this time), however, entering “2 adults” would nearly always return 10-20 hits! I couldn’t help but feel somewhat alienated as a single person, given that there are obviously less places available and choice for those of us who are on our own :(.

At lunch today I went into Runcorn “shopping city” to see if a travel agent could do any better. Over the course of some two and a half hours, a very helpful and persistent lady trawled the *entire globe* for me looking for any single person room availability in a half-decent location (I did reject a few possible places due to them having fairly small pistes). Eventually I left with something booked… albeit not where I originally wanted to go but better than staying in this accursed country for a yet another winter week.

And so I’m going to Austria on Feb 2nd for a week, and to a place I’ve never visited nor even knew existed, called Bad Hofgastein (850m). The Gastein ski area is part of the vast “Ski Amade” area - a total of 5 areas, 865km of piste and 270 lifts. Should provide me with plenty to do! And if that is not enough there are also spa’s and hot pools.

There’s a really cool interactive piste map here (click on Bad Hofgastein to show detail). The majority of runs are intermediate so hopefully I will at least remember something from the last time I hit the slopes otherwise it may be a painful start.