Ingrid and Adrian.

We had a developer day at work and finished it off with bowling and dinner at Ballbreaker.

This was adult bowling, with drinks (optionally) and darkness (not optionally). Well, just a bit of blue light. The only bright thing was the screen showing our scores.

It is March, the snow is almost gone except for a few patches here and there in shady places. And the Aquilegia in the slope previously known as the slope of weeds has decided that it is now spring and time to start growing. I hadn’t quite expected it to be so early.

The long green leaves above it are Carex which turned out to be evergreen. I’m sure I must have taken this into account when choosing it ahead of other grasses, but I’d forgotten all about this fact, so the green tussocks sticking up through snow provided a nice surprise during winter.

THe Alchemilla seems to have tried sending out new leaves throughout the entire winter: I saw little green leaves in various states of growth, many browned at the edges by the cold, but still alive, and fresh ones still bravely appearing in the middle.

We skied. We queued. Ingrid also had just over an hour of ski school every day.

We had pancakes for breakfast (at least Ingrid did) and classy dinners at the hotel restaurant. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the food at the hotel – my veggie dinner was excellent, and breakfast included bread that must have been fresh from a local bakery.

Lunch consisted of hamburgers at the fast-food place at the bottom of the slope, for three days in a row. I had serious cravings for fresh fruit and vegetables by Sunday evening.

We didn’t have much luck with the weather. It was cloudy and windy, so the views weren’t much to look at. But it meant that the slopes were not at all crowded. And we felt lucky anyway, because just as we were skiing down for the last time on Sunday afternoon, more and more lifts were being shut down due to the wind. We also felt lucky to be able to fly back home instead of another three-hour bus ride.

Today was incredibly windy. Down in the valley, even down between the trees, it was just a bit windy. Up at the top of the mountains the wind was so hard that the highest lift was closed because of it. (Later in the afternoon more lifts were closed.)

We struggled to walk against the wind, and were pushed sideways when we sat on the ski lift. Skiing downhill we had the wind in our faces, braking us, but it felt like we were racing down. All fresh tracks were obliterated almost immediately. It wasn’t snowing, but a little fresh snow must have fallen during the night, because the wind was blowing up flurries everywhere, and looking across the mountaintops (rather than down towards the village) the whole world was white.

Then we got down between the trees and it was just a normal day again.