A Season to Savour - 6th April 2013
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| The day the Graukogel closed - 31st March - half a metre of new snow! |
It is the 6th of April and 7pm and I have just looked out the window into the gathering gloom. A large group of skiers is heading down the home run to the village. I imagine they have been celebrating the penultimate day of skiing in a hut on the Schlossalm. They probably have seen the weather forecast for tomorrow and have decided to finish tonight. Skiing after 5 pm when the piste-bashers are doing their work is not terribly sensible. These days the machines often pull themselves up the piste with a cable anchored to a tree. It does not take a vivid imagination to visualise what happens if the ski's go under the cable and some part of the anatomy hits it shortly afterwards.
So the season that opened on the 7th December is now drawing to a close. The volume of snow this winter has not been that great but low temperatures have kept the snow firmly on the ground. Conditions this week have been perfect with very few skiers taking a share of the pistes.
Some of the Restaurants are already closed and the staff are taking the opportunity to hit the slopes. I was surprised to find that one waitress, known by us affectionately as the 'the Madonna with big boobies', is a actually a closet snow-boarder! Sometimes the whole team from a Mountain Hut can be seen skiing together, you'd think that after 4 months working together they would have had enough but that is plainly not the case.
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| The place to ourselves - Feldinghutte |
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| Sportgastein - potted palms in the sunshine |
Skiing with an Austrian friend this week has been both good fun and a little arduous. After 30 - odd consecutive days of skiing my legs are starting to scream for a rest. Franz has a superior technique and seems to glide over and through the snow whereas for this English skier it is more of a fight. My Salomon Mustangs are probably a bit long which is great on the ice but a bit of a struggle on the sloppy lower slopes on the Home Run. Have enjoyed skiing on them though. My planned purchases for the season were a new helmet and goggles but, in fact, I bought neither. Instead I had to buy new poles when one broke, bought new gloves to deal with cold, a new pair of ski's (second hand of course) as the old ones were getting soft and a new jacket as the old one started to fall apart. If you ski about 11 weeks a year I suppose you can expect a bit of wear and tear.
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| A window on Gastein |
It has been a very sociable season. When we first had the apartment we would just turn up for weekends and I would often ski on my own. Now, with other English and Welsh friends, visitors from home and our Austrian friends and TW doing more downhill its rare to have a day in solitary. We also now know a lot of the staff in the mountain restaurants so we are made welcome on our many coffee stops and meal breaks.
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| Maria gives Tom a lesson in making Kaiserscmarrn |
Austrian Mountain food is pretty simple - usually. One of TW's favourite Austrian dishes is Kaiserschmarrn. It's a chopped up pancake which was apparently made for the Emperor by his Mistress. It means the 'Kaisers nonsense' apparently. It looks a bit too tricky for me but TW and Tom have now been trained to produce this nonsense by Maria, Franz's wife.
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| Nephew Tom with TW on the Haitzingalm |
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| Plenty of snow in late March! |
If you catch the ski bus every day you get to know the drivers. We know Wolfgang the best, we get a morning salute as his bus pulls up. We see other drivers at the band concerts that feature regularly at the Kursall. One driver did me a special favour when I was heading up to Sportgastein early one morning. I was a bit late and was going to miss my connection until be radioed head and asked the other bus to wait for me in a Bus Stop.
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| End of season skiing in Bad Hofgastein |
And the final day on the Schlossalm - visibility is down to nil and it getting worse! We gave it a good go but we were beaten by the mist and headed for the Haitzingalm for a final coffee. It was empty of guests and the owners had started their end of season clean-up. We were made welcome and chairs were taken off a table. The best coffee on the hill with a tasty nutty chocolate was delivered. Tom, the owner, supplied a complimentary schnapps - Prost! See you in the Summer!
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| Back on the bike in the Gastein Valley in April |
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