For our first day on the slopes we woke up to a mostly sunny and not too cold day - in other words a pretty good day to hit the slopes. Sean is so much better this morning, thank goodness! Over a breakfast of spoils from last night’s supermarket raid, we agreed on a plan of easy groomers to warm up our legs and mitigate the ‘first day injury’ risk. We also needed coffee - while we have a Nespresso machine in the apartment we kind of all wanted a real coffee, so we intended to get one at a cafe somewhere nearby.
Get me out there!
Even the butter is fancy
We geared up - Cameron in her fancy new jacket - walked up the road to the ski run, and crossed the road. Gates with a timer open let you across, it’s like the barriers opening for the start of the Melbourne Cup - only with humans in ski boots carrying equipment blundering across the road as fast as possible. Tickets purchased, we headed up the Ciampioni Gondola, excited and looking forward to a nice relaxing ski in the sun.
We emerged from the Gondola, snapped on our skis, Cameron strapped in, we put our googles down and headed downhill…straight onto a steep ungroomed mogul run. Hmmm…that was not in the plan. Also I was yet to have a coffee. But not to worry, the snow was fabulous and the scenery is gobsmacking everywhere you look.
The skiing was as good is it looks!
We spied the Saslong slope - we were tempted to do a timed slalom run but decided it was a bit early for that, so we did a few runs down the blue and red slopes around that chairlift. We were delighted to discover that the chairlift had lovely padded seats, with headrests like car seats. Down a couple of nice red slopes cutting through the fluffy snow and we were feeling pretty good, but still in need of coffee. There was a wooden ‘hut’ below us so we decided to ski down to it…another mighty steep and mogully slope…this coffee better be good!
The ‘hut’ turned out to be a beautiful entirely wooden ‘rifugio’ restaurant, with a full bar (yes people were on the beers at 10:30am). So we ordered up 3 lattes and a couple of pain au chocolate…only to be presented with 3 cups of lukewarm foamed milk. Oops! I quickly rectified the situation with 3 macchiatos and we finally had our caffeine fix.
Ahhhh coffee!
Back out we went again, and we decided head over to the next little village, Plan de Gralba, as the slopes looked great, plus there was a myriad of lifts and slopes, plus a boarder-cross park with a cute ice-tunnel. We did a few runs around Plan de Gralba - easy groomers which was in line with the plan (finally!).
All this skiing was making us very hungry so we decided to stop at another rifugio for lunch - which turned out to be another fabulous alpine restaurant. Trouble was brewing when Sean spied schnapps on the drinks menu - I demurred, settling for a glass of red, but Sean and Cameron decided it was a great idea. Schnapps, wine and two pizzas later, we were re-fuelled and ready to go again.
Trouble brewing…
Definitely hit the spot
Back out again!
Post lunch we gave the boarder cross track a go as we were all keen to ski through the tunnel, but first time around only Sean managed to get through the tunnel, Cameron and I missed it completely. Cameron was determined to do the tunnel so we took the lift back up again. Sean and I not being fans of boarder cross passed on it, but Cameron got her wish and made it through the ice tunnel. Cameron was also fascinated with the blue ‘weatherproof’ bubbles on the lifts, not to mention the heated seats (I could get used this!) - not that we needed any of those comforts as the weather was lovely.
We realised how tired we were, all of us were feeling it in our legs, so after another couple of runs, we decided to head for home…but we really weren’t sure which way to go. The trail markings are so different to North America and the ski area is so huge it is pretty confusing. We ended up on yet another black mogul run - I may have taken a little tumble in the process - and the piste was also getting pretty icy and skied out, so it was a fairly dicey trip home with tired legs. Luckily Sean has an excellent sense of direction and managed to get us to the bottom of the lift to take us to the run home - after we had to climb a long flight of stairs and cross a bridge to get there.
Fabulous scenery
We were very happy to be home - it was an unintentionally huge first day - so we hit the showers. We’d planned to go out for dinner but we were too exhausted, plus we had to go back to the supermarket because we were out of hair conditioner. This is a serious issue when there are two people with long hair in the house!! So we ended up picking up some goodies for dinner and Sean cooked spaghetti bolognese which we washed down with half a bottle of lovely red - fantastic! Exhausted we all crashed, ready for another big day tomorrow.
This featured blog entry was written by Redsole from the blog The Italian Job.
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