The big skiing tour of the year was quite a tour! After sleeping at my place Fuglan, Hans, John and me left Stuttgart at four in the morning in our rented VW Passat, the very same car we used on the other skiing trip. With Hans at the wheel we found ourself in Arosa in the Swiss Alps shortly before eight in the morning, soon the lifts opened and our first day of skiing begun. The skiing system was modern, but in general quite boring, although we got our best off-pist run of the tour this day. Notable was that John managed to tear his bindings off from his skis as he once fell heavily. Sadly, as it was probably the hardest fall of the tour, the other three of us didn't see it. After a sunny day of skiing we then set off for Alagna, Italy.

Anders, a friend of Hans, is skiing the whole season in Alagna and we stayed with him and his friends. Around Alagna itself there is only one pist, but you don't want to go there. Instead you take the VERY old cablecar to the top of a mountain and you then go offpist. Eventually you can reach two resorts with pists, but you can also keep going offpist using other lifts. The two days in Alagna were really sunny, but it hadn't snowed for three weeks and the snow was very hard everywhere. It was definately a great experience though. I will also remember the Norweigan "Heroes from the Telemark" who for several days had built a 2,5 metre high jump and on our second day there climed a whole mountain side to get enough speed to jump it.

The six days of skiing in Les Arcs, France was the ultimate goal of the trip. Only 200 kilometres or so away from Alagna we hoped for a quick trip, but we were very dissapointed. Thirty kilometres from Les Arcs, on the very border between Italy and France there was a mountain pass which had been closed. We had to make our way back down the mountain, through  the 30€ Mont Blanc tunnel and then go all the way back around the mountain again to reach Les Arcs from the French side. On the Frech side however were long car queues and we arrived at eight in the evening, almost six hours after we turned around and having driven an extra 200 kilometres.

In Les Arcs we met up with exchange students from Grenoble and friends of theirs and we were now totally twelve people, all male, eleven Swedish, one Englishman. We were lucky in Les Arcs , room on the first floor and for the lifts not at all as long lines of people as we had feared. No fresh snow here either however, only a lot of sun, meant skiiing on hard snow. Eating our brought lunch at a rock on a mountain side every day we soaked the sun.

The first three days the weather was great but the following three it got more cloudy and pretty hard to see in the slopes. When the Saturday finally arrived the four of us felt very happy about going home to Stuttgart.

Nine days of skiing and that in three different countries was a great experience! Totally broke I now dream of buying a new pair of skis, hoping that can make me a better skier!