Long and windy road

Next morning we had an early breakfast at 6:30 am, the luggage had to be re-arranged to fit in Hup's stuff as well. Our Volvo was a tad on the small side to fit everything in, but after a little pushing and shoving we could close the booth of the car and we drove to the Brennero. Lots of snow on the pass when we entered Italy, instead of heading to Bressanone we had to drive to Chienes and Val di Badia, we stopped off in La Villa were we purchased our ski passes. In the meantime it had started to snow, which was going to be great for the skiing but not getting up to higher elevation without snow chains. For a while we managed, but then the car came to a hold and we had to put them on, causing a traffic jam and lots of cars honking their horns.

After Colfosco we got stuck behind a snow scraper which was not a bad thing, it was snowing heavily and thick layer of snow was covering the road, if it hadn't been for the scraper we might have had a problem getting up to the pass. The road seemed never ending because of the many turns and the poor visibility. But in the end we made it and parked up the car, unloaded the luggage and had hot chocolate before heading out on the slopes. There was a thick layer of fresh snow on the piste, unfortunately the visibility was poor. And we had to get our ski legs back. Towards the end of the day I had my first crash, my ski seemed to stop while the other one was still going on a fairly flat bit of slope. The result was that I head dove into a pile of fluffy snow. After brushing off the snow we continued skiing. It was not until about an hour later that I discovered while taking my skies out of the gondola that my binding had come partially undone from the ski. It meant that my skiing day was over and I had to get it fixed before the shops would close.

Luckily I could go down the mountain with the chairlift, while the others skied down. One of the lift attendants had a look at the binding and told me that there was no way that it could be repaired. This meant I had to either buy new skies or rent them. We drove back to Colfosco to one of the rental places just in time to hire a pair of skies. It was confirmed my own skies were ready to be binned. After sorting that out we drove back up the mountain just in time for dinner and to meet some of the others of our ski group.