Picture yourself in the company of friends who are so special that they’ve arranged an apartment in one of the world’s great snow resorts at the very foot of the gondolas, specifically so that they can accompany you to the tiny patches of snow at the top of the mountain in the hope of watching one of you go nuts as she stands for the very first time in falling snow. Now ask yourself, what can possibly go wrong?
When we arrived at the apartment it was stunning. As advertised. Everything was right there before our very eyes, or would have been if the cloud would lift just for a bit. That cloud. It was the wet rainy kind, the sort that delays the forecast for the first snow of the season until the day after you leave for Australia.
That wasn’t a problem really, it would have been close to a miracle to see falling snow given our timing, but at least we could ride the gondolas to the peaks to scratch around in what was already there, or we could have if they hadn’t all been closed just for this week for pre-season maintenance.
We could have gone to the Olympic Ski Jump site for the same reason, but it’s only open on Mondays. We could have had a long hot spa bath in the apartment if the water hadn’t been cut off for the day at five in the morning without warning.
Thanks to having nothing else to see except bears and waterfalls and boring stuff like that, we stumbled upon the Olympic Sliding Venue where braver souls than we were qualifying for the weekend’s big event. We stood transfixed for hours, possibly due in part to our feet being frozen in place, while Skeletons and Bob Sleighs shot past at speeds that were approaching that of the past week rushing by, providing a spectacle that will remain in our minds long after those first stupid snow flakes would have melted anyway.
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