so after a week of recovery from egypt, we went from sandy desert to hitting some slopes again. rented out this chalet type thing in the village of laax, about 2.5 hours away by bus and train. headed out friday night, loaded down with some supplies for a weekend of good times. got my free sbb snow'n rail ski bag so took that bad boy out for a spin. turns out they do in fact hold skis. arrived in laax to some nice wet slushy snow on the ground. for a pretty cheap hostel price the 'chalet' wasn't too bad, good enough for a couple nights anyhow. dropped off our stuff and got right down to business, steve ate the worst smelling egg salad ever and a bottle of grey goose made it's way around, leading to a fairly short night involving a bath and a good night's sleep.
got up nice and early next morning, strapped on the gear, ran across the street to take the 1 minute bus to the bottom of the gondola. turns out there's this big ski festival called 'the brits' going on where there are a ton of british people hanging out and partying with some events and club nights etc. this was the last weekend though but there were still kids hitting big jumps and the halfpipe which we had a good view of on the lifts. first time skiing spring snow, not bad, some fresh stuff at the top and it did get a little heavy towards the bottom but overall it was really good. my second time at laax, and it's a big mountain, so there was lots of stuff to ski, had a nice lunch at the top of the mountain and then closed it down for the day with a slushy ski out. there was no kitchen in this 'chalet' so basically i ended up eating 7 hard boiled eggs this day. a quick disco nap, a game of shoulders, and we were ready to go out for some apres ski action. there was a big wind-up party for the brits festival as mentioned, so a short walk up the hill took us to 'riders palace', basically a big hotel/restaurant/bar building. some pretty good djs, some dubstep, some drum and bass, in all a pretty good night.
woke up a little earlier, had some fresh snow overnight so some good skiing to be had. cleared up later in the day, and then came the time to throw on the snowboard for a bit. so basically it had been a year or so since i went riding, and it definitely took a couple runs to get back into it, but definitely still really fun. switching from skis to the board feels really weird on your legs. so basically i have never been good at t-bars on a board anyways, and pretty much just got owned on my first time back on one. so, basically epic fail on the t bar...so impossible on a snowboard anyways, also not having done it for awhile may have had something to do with it. so just fell off the t-bar, struggling in the snow, see chris moore coming up from a distance, think to myself 'hey i think i could try and hop on with him' and flail around, miraculously manage to get up and grab the bar, lose grip on the bar, at this point chris is hanging on with just his hands, i'm holding on to his arm, we're going up this hill and i just bail again. ski down, take it back like 80% of the way up, then this other guy's like 'hey dude, can i hop on with you' and i'm like '....uhhhhhhhhhhh' so he comes and knocks me over at which point i've just resigned myself to defeat. but in the end i did get the feeling of the boarding back and it was pretty good to get going on that again. stupid t-bars, skiing is the way to go on those. anyways had another good day of skiing, probably the last in the alps, unfortunately, but had a great season with something like 15 days, which i'm really happy about and definitely glad that i learned to ski and all that.
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