Ready to go down the slope.

If you look carefully, you can see a glimpse of blue sky back there! We’re ending our ski trip on a high note, with the best skiing conditions thus far.

Adrian goes down the hill like a hay wagon. Plants his skis wide, aims them in the right direction and then heads straight down. Barely brakes, rarely turns.

Ingrid shows off her hockey stop skills.

Day three of skiing and snowboarding.

Ski school is the best thing ever, and so is skiing, say the kids.

Adrian is progressing in leaps and bounds. He has graduated from the kids’ slopes to the real thing and bravely goes snow ploughing down the green slopes together with us.

Ingrid’s ski school group has gone down blue and red slopes and even a little bit of black. She’s practicing her “hockey stop” and is proud and pleased with the amount of snow that goes flying when she stops.

Eric and I have found a favourite green slope and even though we occasionally try others, we keep coming back to “Grandma’s downhill race”.

I have a new pair of ski boots for today. I’ve never found ski boots particularly comfortable, and the ones I rented initially seemed as good or as bad as any other. But yesterday afternoon I could barely stand or walk in them, because they hurt my shins so badly. I exchanged them for the widest model available, and the difference is huge! Now my shins no longer feel like I’m pushing them into a pair of narrow drainpipes. From my vantage point, my calves look like any other, but I guess my perspective is distorted.

Just like during last year ski trip, and like the year before, the weather here in Stöten is cloudy and the air is full cloud and fog and snow, especially at the top. And it’s windy. When we get to the top of the hill, our thoughts focus on how to immediately start getting down the hill, in between the trees, away from the wind.

This morning the snowfall actually turned into rain. By lunchtime we were all sodden and went back to our apartment to dry our clothes. But the afternoon brought snow again instead of rain, so we went back out.

The kids are enjoying ski school. And enjoying skiing – which was far from a given, since it’s Adrian’s first time and he can be quite cautious about activities where he can hurt himself.

We’re all at very different levels. I have decent technique (I think), but I am cautious and like relaxed skiing on easy slopes, preferably with nice views. Ingrid has no technique and mostly snow ploughs straight down, but likes “adventure” slopes with lots of turns and bumps. Adrian is a total beginner and goes up to the 2nd post on the beginner slope platter lift, then gets off and skis straight down. And Eric snowboards instead of skiing.

So we’ve been splitting up in various constellations throughout the day. The closest thing to skiing together as a family is when Adrian has ski school and the rest of us go down a nice green slope together.

What the weather generally looked like at the top of the mountain in Idre.

Snowy wonderland in Idre.

It started snowing just before lunch, and as the afternoon went on, there was more and more snow, as well as more and more wind. It didn’t get quite as windy as in Hemavan last year (when the winds forced lifts to be closed) but with the icy grains of snow it was pretty unpleasant. Especially on the lifts, where we were exposed to the full force of the snow and wind and had neither trees nor even the mountain itself to protect us, since we were above everything. We huddled, and made sure to cover every bare patch of skin with scarfs and mittens.

And I definitely did not stop at the top for photography. Not that there was anything to see there either, because the clouds were low and the air was full of snow. It was all a very white whiteness. “The nothingness,” Ingrid called it.

When we got down among the trees and stopped to look, what looked like snow on the trees turned out to be ice crystals.

Ingrid and I are in Idre for this year’s skiing holiday. This time we have my mum with us as well. During the days we will each be going our separate ways as we ski downhill while she does Nordic skiing. But we had company for the six-hour drive, and for breakfast and evenings.

The lifts close at 16:30 already so today we didn’t have time for much more than picking up our skis and just enough skiing to make our bodies remember what it feels like.

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.

View from the hotel restaurant during our breakfast. Sunlight on a distant east-facing mountain but nowhere near us yet; icicles dripping nevertheless.