It was a holiday of firsts… Our first white Christmas, The first time on skis for the Schalk Van Dudgeonwyks, my (Trent’s) first black run, and it was also the the first time Trent dived like an MI6 agent to save Caryn from falling down a huge slope into someone’s wooden lodge. More on this later…
In summary, it was awesome. If this is as much as you want to know, you can stop reading here…
We had 6 full days on the snow, 5 of which were in lessons for half of the day. Anton and Tandy had lessons in the morning and ours were in the afternoon, which meant we didn’t ski much together in the first few days. Anton took a bludgeoning approach to skiing which meant he was awesome when he could go fast but fell over like someone who falls over a lot when he was skiing slowly and trying to turn. Much like myself, actually… 🙂
We took the Schalks out on their first proper run after about 3 lessons, knowing that it was a fairly simple run except for this massive section in the middle where you have to point your skis downhill and go as fast as you can or you would never get up the hill on the other side. I wasn’t sure how we were going to get around this, but after having resigned myself that we would be hiking up the hill Caryn said “There’s a massive downhill, you need to go as fast as you can. Off you go then.†and sent them on their merry way to death and destruction. Strangely enough no one fell, no one died, and no one was sued, and from then on we ski’d everywhere.
Caryn and I had a special moment towards the end of the holiday while we were doing a red run in preparation for a black run we were supposedly doing in the afternoon. Anyways, right at the end of this red run we hit this ‘vertical’ HUGE slope. Our approach was to stand at the top of the slope and contemplate it. We would have liked to contemplate it for much longer than we did, but I slipped and fell. And fell. And fell. After sliding uncontrollably for what felt like ages I came to an abrupt stop in the middle of a small drift feeling cold, sore, and very sorry for myself. The fall had managed to get snow everywhere (and I do mean everywhere) and my jacket pockets had ripped off which meant my camera (with it’s brand new memory card) was somewhere between where I was and where Caryn was at the top. (To be fair I would rather be where where I was – Caryn still had to get down somehow…)
So I did what everywhere loving and caring husband would – I ignored Caryn and started looking for the camera. Actually, I didn’t ignore Caryn completely – I tried to enlist her in the all-important camera search. I thought that the best thing would be for Caryn to look for the camera from where she was, which was at the top. Caryn, on the other hand, thought my frantic camera communications were along the lines of “I just fell, please take a picture of me†and what she was trying to communicate was something along the lines of “I am about to fall, I can’t even stand up properly, leave me alone†although I don’t think I got the wording quite right there. Feel free to ask Caryn.
Anyways, after a few more minutes of this, I see nothing of Caryn but I do see one of her skis go sliding past me. I thought this would be a good time to stop asking about the camera. Caryn eventually got to me using the traditional bum-brake method, at which time we calmly discussed our differences. There were gestures involved.
So… we regrouped and decided to look for the camera (ironically this was Caryn’s idea, not mine). Strangely, looking for a silver camera on reflective snow doesn’t work that well. I was heading towards giving up when I saw Caryn fall out of the corner of my eye. I knew she was going to fall uncontrollably, much the same way I did, so I ran and did the most heroic dive ever. Even in my memory it’s a slow motion shot. It’s a pity it only made things worse… I did manage to grab Caryn’s arm, only to have her pull me along with her. I stayed calm and said “Oh £@£$%^†and we both plummeted towards a wooden cabin. As we sped towards said obstacle I did find myself wondering whether this was a good thing (at least it will stop us) or a bad thing (I found myself feeling very breakable all of a sudden) but luckily I never found out as the off-piste snow eventually stopped us before any conclusive results regarding death by cabin were reasoned out.
And that was that. Well, for Caryn, anyway. I still had to hike BACK UP THE SLOPE to fetch our skis. The thought of this all was quite depressing, so I just sat down and went back to doing what I originally wanted to do, which was contemplate the slope. While I was sitting there a random snowboarder boarded up to me and said “Excuse me, but did you lose a camera?†This is him. Isn’t he a nice guy?
TODO
We ended off the holiday on a real high after the 4 of us went a beautiful long run all the way to a small Swiss town at the bottom where we had a late lunch and hot chocolate. Unfortunately the day disappeared quickly and we had to resign ourselves to the fact that we didn’t have any more time to do another run, which was a real pity ‘cos I wanted to take Anton on a red run. However, we got to Wengen (the ski area at the top of the slopes) and before we got on the train (at 5:29pm… the slopes were officially closed at 5:30pm because of lack of light) Anton and I jumped out the train and jumped onto the slopes to try to race the train (and the light) by taking a half hour cross country slope down to Lauterbrunnen. It was scary, exhausting and seriously icy but Anton and I had the best run of our holiday! Unfortunately the train beat us, but only my about 2 minutes and we arrived in time to see it pull off with our lovely wives looking out the window (apparently).
So.. all’s well that ends well, and this ended very well indeed. Next one… December… 😛
Trent.