I just got back from two weeks in Austria and one week in France on a snowboarding trip with a few friends. This was my first trip to France, and third trip to Austria.
France was a bit meh, but Austria, well like I said, it was my third time.
The mountains are incredible, the terrain you can access from the lifts is truly mind blowing, sure there are some long traverses, but they are half the fun, and if you can't hack the traverse, you don't deserve the turns.
Thats my mate Joel, the little yellow sign was a cliff sign, and they whole visible face in front of him can be accessed from a lift! You can see the traverse line running across teh face about halfway down. See how the slope glides peacefully away to his right, check out the other side.
To get an idea of scale, you can see two people standing halfway down the hill.
But that slope was relatively small, this place is enourmous
See those tiny dots centre left...people.... i mean a slope that fucking big that you disappear into teh distance, on a day that beautiful, knee deep fluffy dry powder top to glorious bottom, and about 10 people scattered across it.
They snow was so light and fluffy, I'm claiming thigh deep more than once, thats me on the left in the green jacket.
To access all of this terrain there is a network of high speed high volume lifts disecting the mountain for maximum access. No random jumble of aging lifts like you get in other countries. These lifts are state of the art, heated seat, laser switch, magnetic ticket goodness. Check this one out it is amazing.
For those who care, lift pass was 35 euro.
Our accommodation was truly special. It had a sauna, a steam room, and the worlds most kick ass shower, 7 shower heads and an auto refilling dunking bucket full of cold water. You would go from the sauna to the steam room, then into this beauty, switch on all seven nozzles and tip cold water over your head, baaarghhh!! epic evil genius.
Austrian food is awesome. It's cheap, it's hearty, it's plentiful, it is tasy as hell, and it is unapollogetic, this food is trying to harden your arteries, and makes no bones about it. It's a million different kinds of sausage, cheese, hams and deep fried goodness. My favorite was the bernerwurst, a sausage wrapped in bacon, and injected with swiss cheese, ooh yeah.
There was this one dish, ham 6 ways up to 24 months dead. I mean who eats that..!... except me when I order blindly from the menu and this is carried out by a surly guy in his 40's wearing lederhosen that have probably never been washed(it's an Austrian thing), and a wireless credit card swiper hanging off his belt. As it turns out my mate Andrew loves aged hams, and engineered our return to that particular restaurant a week later so he could order his own.
For added entertaiment, one day we had to eatoutside, and the tempertaure was around -30 ie, really fucking cold. Beautiful sunny day, not a breath of wind, but seriously cold. They bring out our food on plates like any other day, and we scoff this stuff down as quick as we could because it was going cold really fast. Before I had finished my lunch my glass of lemonade was literally freezing around the edges.
There is also the live oompah bands for atmosphere. We go to a pub one night and it is full of guys singing and dancing, some on tables, to oompah music.
So that was Austria, which resort you wondering.....it's in Japan, go to Japan...... I've never been to Austria
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