This year was time to go to Austria again. To the mountains, of course :) To slide down with snowboard, of course :)
Life cannot get better than this :)
MountainSo this year we didn't go very far from home - every day only like 1 hour of driving :p So we stayed in Styria, Schladming area.
My favorite place this year was
Reiteralm. Best slopes where: 1, 2, 3 and 5. Biggest surprise for me was that I liked black slope (nr 2), it wasn't cleaned, so the snow was higher than my knees :) I guess it wasn't much snowboarding but more laughing and trying to find out where the sky is :) After those three times that I came down from there I was totally beat, but very-very happy.
I'm ready to go down the black slope, jepiiiajee :p
Me and Kerttu resting (it's not easy coming down the black slope :))
The best thing that happened: I can now say that I can snowboard :P At least that is what I believe and for me, that is the most important thing. There is no other feeling like that in the hole world.
Me and Tiina, ready to rumble :D
StatisticsThis year it was possible to get the statistics for every used ticket. I guess the system is like this: system calculates the downhill statistics from the lifts you have taken up hill :)
My overall summary statistics for those 4 skiing days:
* Used 43 Lifts
* Overall vertical meters: 18 420 m
* approx. downhill distance: 85 750 m (best day was 29 km :p)
I even tried the speedometer (or what ever this thing is called) and the top speed for me was 45 km/h. Well, I guess it's not that impressive but for me it was enough. Maybe next year I'll manage to go down faster :p
SnowThere was much more snow than two years ago. For example, last time I was there, there was almost no snow around the house, but this year there was so much that we couldn't even see out of our bathroom window. Not even a glimpse of sky :P
It is miraculous how the snow cleaning is organized - even small villages are cleaned every day. In comparison, in Estonia they cannot even manage to clean the capital :p But now back to Austria. Snowplows are great... and scary, as we found out ourselves. It had been snowing almost all day and we where a little worried if we manage to get to our house or not (the snowplow had broken down last night as we were snowed in in the morning for like an our before smaller tractor cleaned the road). So we where driving home and feeling extremely happy as the road was totally clean, when there was a small light coming toward us (oh, I forgot to mention that the road was hardly as wide for one car). A little panic went though our heads as we saw a small snowplow coming toward us at full speed :) Luckily Robert had quick reflexes and back down the narrow road. Finally the snowplow was able to slow down and we find a place to pass each other. Enough excitement for one day :)
Every day started with shovelling the snow so we could drive the car out of the garage :) As you can see there is quite a lot of snow :p
Our car with the chains on. Putting them on and taking them off was a interesting event (especially for me as I always only watched :))
FlightsWell, one would think that with the economy crisis and all, the planes would be half empty and more room for me :) But no, flights were totally full and for one flight, I had to sit between 2 totalnon-attractive guys :D At least there food on every flight, even EstonianAir is serving food now :p
Another big part of flights and airports is lost baggage :) Luckily it didn't happen to me but it's still quite uncomfortable to receive your baggage in the middle of the vacation. At least Kerttu was smart enough to pack necessary things to carry on and we didn't have to miss a day on the mountain.
PartyWe had Robert's and Kerttu's 72nd birthday party :p They made verryyy good cake. Mmmm
