winter wonderland

jan 3, 2011
munich

The last couple of days have been a whirlwind of winter fun.  We left the Geneva safe house on new years day at somewhere after high noon.  We had reserved the mitsubishi Lancer but ended up with a Lancia which jill promptly fell in love with.  So far jill's two favorite activities of the new year have been complaining about my navigation skills and extolling the virtues of her new Italian love machine.  We ended up in a town called MeIningen somewhere in the mountains.  Next morning we headed towards Chur and ended up in Klosters where we rented skis and hit the slopes at a "family oriented" resort called Madrisa.  I hadn't been on skis since i bought my first sims switchblade at Skates on Haight in 1988.  Our fearless leader decided to eschew the bunny hill as the twins had a couple of epic days in Maine last year.  So we hit the gondola and headed up.  At the top we looked around and found that we were in the land of the t-bar.  There were some ugly moments on the 25 minute t-bar ride but we eventually reached the top to find the beginning of a slope-clearing snowstorm/whiteout.  I think we reached the top at about 2:00 and reached the bottom of the run at around 4:30. You do the math.  I'm not sure that the twins were fully buying Jill's philosophy that feeling the snow is more important than seeing.

we hopped back in Jill's new bff and cruised the autobahn at a tame 170 kmph to Munich where we crashed with Konstanze and her 12 year old daughter Johanna.  We had last seen Konstanze in Seattle 15 years ago.   today was backcountry sledging at its finest.  We fired up Lance and headed to the Bavarian Oberland.  Hiked for a sunny hour and a half up a beautiful, winding logging road which had been perfectly primed.  Fortified ourselves at the mountain hutte, and then mounted our sledges for the screaming-high speed-somewhat-out-control-most joyous descent.  Jill and clare had to bail out on one particularly sharp turn and clare has a nice shiner to show for it.  Later we went to a monastery for dinner.  The nuns observe vows of silence but make great beer.  We all had pork and dumplings with brown gravy and slaw.  Perfect day.