Our Skiing Trip

Hello! We are back from our skiing trip to Ochsengarten, a little village in the Tyrolian mountains. And it was great. We had fantastic snow, great food, excercise and a lot of fun. And I think a week was too short. Well, actually there was one good reason why leaving after a week was ok.... but more about that later. Let me write a little bit about our vacation first.

The drive took for ever. Starting on a Saturday itself is not the best idea, going south on a Saturday with thousands of Dutch, Enlish and Danish cars on the Autobahn is really bad. I left Essen at about 6:30 am and picked up Dave at the airport Frankfurt/Hahn by 10 am. His flight was 50 minutes delayed, but that wasn't too bad. From Hahn we drove further south and everything was going fine until we came to the A7. From there it was stop and go for many hours, all the way to the mountains and over the pass to Tyrol. It was really bad. The good thing was that my concerns about the road conditions in the mountains were wrong. We did something I really felt bad about: we went there without real winter tires (only the standard all season tires) and without snow chains. But buying all this equipment for a 7 days trip would have been more expensive than the stay in the "Gasthof" (little hotel) including breakfast and dinner. But the road up to Ochsengarten was cleaned off and dry and we had no problems at all....on that day. We arrived at 7pm, on time for our first dinner there.

The next morning awaited us with sunshine from a clear blue sky and temperatures around 4F. Pretty cold, but not too cold for a perfect skiing day in Kuehtai. And it was great. We enjoyed all the runs, had lunch at a little cabin on the mountain and skied until our legs told us to stop in the afternoon. The weather forecast for the next week talked about low visibility on the mountain and snow to come. So we decided to rent some cross country skiis:



And the forecast was right. On Monday the visibility on the mountain was almost zero and we decided to try the short cross country trail in Ochsengarten. It was nice, but with on 6km not "day filing". In the afternoon we drove down to a famous cross country village in the valley: Langenfeld. It took us some time to find the starting point for the trails. At 4pm we went on a 9km tour. And honestly, after that I had enough of skiing for the next day or so.

Talking about the next day: It snowed. Actually it was very nice, I like it, I just don't know why we decided to take our car and drive down to the valley again on Tuesday. The problem was not going down. The problem was more the going up again. After walking around the little town of Oetz and having lunch there we wanted to go back to our place again. But we didn't get very far before we came to the "snow chains required" sign. Well, as mentioned before, we didn't have chains and so we had to turn around, park our car in Oetz and wait for a ski bus to bring us home. And honestly, even without the sign we wouldn't have any chance going uphill on that steep and narrow mountain road without winter tires. We've seen enough cars on our way up which were stuck there.

The next day, it was already Wednesday, welcomed us with blue sky and sunshine. Wow, perfect weather and perfect snow...but no car for going to Kuehtai. But it didn't matter, we could go to Hochoetz from where we stayed. This skiing area is not as big as Kuehtai, but maybe even nicer. The only bad thing was that it was so crowded. The road to Kuehtai was closed due to avalanche danger in the morning and nobody could get there for skiing. Therefore everybody decided to go to Hochoetz. Anyhow, we had such a great day downhill skiing there. Oh, wait: here is a picture of our little village on that day:




When we came back to our hotel the owner offered Dave a ride to Oetz to pick up our car again.

We had more sun on Thursday and decided to go back to Laengenfeld for some more cross country skiing. This time we took a little bit longer tour. We had the whole day and enjoyed skiing in the sun.



On Friday it started snowing again. We had to turn in our cross country ski and decided to do this in the morning. We didn't want to chance a road closure again. We took the hotel owner's car for the trip to Kuehtai, and that was a very wise idea. Again we passed many, many cars which didn't make up the hill without chains.
After we returned to Ochsengarten we went on a nice hike and enjoyed our last day in Austria. Here again a snow picture from that day. It shows the little school in Ochsengarten.



That was our last day. To avoid the high traffic again we started our trip home to Essen at 5am on Saturday morning. And belive it or not, there were so many cars on the road alreay. And in both directions. But the drive wasn't bad and we arrived in Essen in the early afternoon, had sushi for dinner and on Sunday took the ferry to England. We had a fantastic time!
Oh, wait, I promised to tell you the reason why we were not too sad to leave Ochsengarten. The day we arrived another family arrived there late, too. Three of them were very sick with a stomach virus. And sure enough, almost everybody working or staying at that little hotel got that virus over the next week and was sick for 1 or 2 days. We were two of the few lucky ones and escaped early enough ;o)

My week in Essen.

As mentioned in my last post I spent this week in Essen. Since we will finally move to the US end of this coming summer and also because I am spending most of my time in England already it was time to clean out the first floor of my house in Essen. Eva will move here beginning of March and Marcus and her want to put laminat flooring in and paint the walls before their new furniture will be delivered in a few weeks. So Marcus and I spent this week disassembling my furniture. In addition to that we also worked on the basement and got rid of so many things. We went to the recycling station with three loads of rubbish.

I also had to get our new car ready for the trip to Austria. It went well when it came to buying a box for the roof and all this, but now we hope that they won't require snow chains, because for our size of the wheels and tires VW doesn't approve any chains. We really hope that the roads will be plowed.

In addition to all the work the week had two very nice days, too. On Monday we celebrated Silke's (my sister in law) birthday and yesterday I met with a former colleague and later with an old friend from school.

Now I am updating this blog before shutting off the computer for more than a week. Tomorrow morning I will pick up Dave in Frankfurt-Hahn and then we will go to Austria. You can expect my "report" on the trip as soon as I am back to England. Until then: stay tuned.

A weekend in Essen

I am in Essen, Germany. And since we will go on a skiing trip to Austria next week I decided to take the ferry and drive my car over to Germany. You may have heard that the current weather in England is crazy, tons of snow, the airport London Heathrow was closed down for a while and so were many, many roads. The reason was simple: since usually it doesn't snow that much here England decided to save money and don't buy any snow plows. Well, maybe they will reconsider this now. But back to my trip: Even with almost all of England under a nice white cover East Anglia (our area) is almost snow free. That meant I didn't have any problems to drive from Thetford to Harwich on Friday early morning. I mean real early morning, sometime between getting up and waking up. It was an easy, 1h 20 min drive. The ferry went from Harwich to Hoek van Holland and it took 6.5h. I had my own cabin and had enough time to take a nap and relax before I had to go on the 3 hours drive through the Netherlands. And that was really crazy. It was a Friday evening and it seemed like everybody was on the roads. It took me much longer than I expected. But that didn't matter, because Dave's flight from Stansted to Germany was late, too. Yes, Dave spent the weekend here with me.

We were invited to a 70th birthday party of my friend Marcus' father. And it was a great and crazy party again. The whole thing took place at an old castle, a very small one, but a real castle. Have a look:




Marcus and Juergen performed the German song show they did on our wedding. And the highlight was our performance as village people.










Everybody has so much fun. It was a great day.

The plans for the coming week are mainly to clean of the first floor of my house now. Marcus and Eva, who are renting it, bought new furniture and also want to move in all of Eva's stuff now. That means I will have a lot of work with sorting things our, driving to the recycling center and get everything else packed. Marcus and another friend, Frank, will help me on Tuesday. Yes, this is the next step to my final move. And it feels very right.
And then I am so much looking forward to our one week trip to Ochsengarten, Austria starting next Saturday. But this will be another post here on my blog.