Vacation to Switzerland

Hello everybody, I’m back at home and rested up by the time you can read this (no Wi-Fi, remember from last post?). This is my story of what we did in 7 days of skiing holidays with a group of 9 people. I hope you like it!

Saturday 4/4/2015: Day of arrival

We, of course, had to drive our car all the way to Switzerland. It’s an 800 kilometre drive from our home, and it took about 10:30 hours in total (eating 2 meals  and refilling our fuel included). We then got ourselves some skis: first we looked if there were unused skis we could use at our apartment, if there weren’t we would’ve rented some but there were so there was no need to spend even more money.

I took some pictures of the area, all just from our balcony. The view we have here is awesome, yet I already know that the view from all the way on top of the mountain is even better. I’ll probably take a picture of that view this week.

 The weather was terrible on our way here, it was constantly raining and there was some thick mist. When we arrived at La Tzoumaz itself, however, it was snowy (perfect!) and there was not too much wind so that the cold temperatures still felt like normal. Right now it’s still snowing, and it’s already 7:20PM. The weather predictions are good: it’s going to snow throughout the week, and the snow won’t melt as the temperatures will stay under 0°C. We’ll be able to ski into our apartment by the end of the week if it keeps on snowing like this :P.

Now I still have to get my bed ready for the night, but I’ll do that later. Right now it’s time for resting and updating my blog post as the way here was very long and we are, of course, a bit tired. A long drive like that combined with getting up at 4:30AM really gets you out of your sleeping habits. I have never been able to sleep in a car, so that was not an option either. I kept myself busy with games like Subway Surfers and Temple Run 2.

My personal predictions for this week are good: our group is not as big as the last couple of years, so we won’t have to split up all the time. There’s no exceptionally fast skiers with us, so everyone should be able to just go along with the group all week. I’ve really looked forward to this vacation and after the exams I can really use some time off school. It feels amazing not having to do any homework, just being able to choose whatever you want to do. For our entertainment while not skiing, we have each other, some board games, a card game and some books. I’ve also taken my phone and a mini-sized laptop with me. We won’t be bored!

Sunday 4/5/2015: First day of skiing

I’ve just got up. It’s 7:50AM at the moment, we are going to eat breakfast in about 15 minutes. The view from my bedroom is even better than the view I showed you guys in yesterday’s section. There’s some clouds at the moment, but it should be alright. I think we are going to have fun, today is just the beginning of the actual skiing part of the holidays. There’s some fun days to come.

For breakfast, we had some bread (brown and white) with whatever we wanted. There was more than enough for everyone. We discussed where we would ski today, and decided it was best to take it easy for today. After all, it’s a year ago, for most of us, since we last came here to ski.

We weren’t able to ski much, it’s 11AM right now and we’re back at our apartment. For now, I’ll just enjoy the view and keep myself busy with writing. We can go on the internet at a small shop near Savoleyres (up the mountain). My sister went there, but I don’t really think it’s worth the time it takes to get there.

Lunch is pretty much the same as breakfast here, just some bread with whatever you want on it. We are planning on going back up the mountain this afternoon, as the clouds will probably go away so we’ll be able to see where we ski. I, of course, want to go with the others.

So far we have only skid down the mountain once, we stopped earlier than we were planning on stopping. It was slow, as we had to stay close to each other and make sure we hadn’t lost anyone all the time. My skis seem to be really good, my helmet is on the bigger side as I don’t have one myself and we haven’t had the time to buy me a new helmet just yet.

It’s now 6:05PM, we went back to ski a bit more and see if the clouds had gone yet. They were still there, but we decided to try and ski anyways so we went down the mountain 2 more times and drank some hot chocolate. We’ve bought me a new helmet, it was pretty expensive but I’m sure it’ll last for quite some time so we’ll profit compared to having to rent one every single time.

The snow has turned sticky, stacking up so that you often fall when you ski into these heaps. This has resulted in some falls, yet nothing serious: we don’t go that fast, especially not when the weather is this bad.

Dinner tasted great, as always when my grandmother cooks, and there was some home-made pudding for dessert.

As you may know, the Snowcat simply drives over the snow. It has a kind of bulldozer structure at the front: the snow that isn’t meant to be there gets pushed further until there’s a hole for it to fall into. At the back of the Snowcat, there’s an additional bulldozer-ish thing that erases the vehicle’s tracks. It’s a complicated system and I think it’s probably extremely hard to drive over small paths and stuff like that. I just don’t understand how such a big vehicle can go up and down the mountain at a pretty fast speed while flattening the snow underneath it.

Now it’s already pretty late (8:50PM), we’re probably going to play a card game for a while and go to bed after. I have really enjoyed the holidays so far, even though we haven’t been able to properly ski so far. We are ready to go for the week, so let’s get ready for the actual fun!

Monday 4/6/2015: Let’s go!

The clouds from yesterday have vanished during the night, today we enjoyed a nice and blue sky. The snow was just perfect (not too icy, not too sticky), yet it got stickier once we went further downhill. We were able to ski all day, until the elevators closed. I really enjoyed that: it was the first full day of skiing this year!

We decided to stay on this side of the mountain most of the time, yet we went to the opposite side a couple of times just because we liked one particular ski slope. The ski slopes we chose were mostly the harder ones, yet we did some easy ski slopes just to get ourselves some rest in between. Those red ski slopes can be very exhausting after some time: you have to constantly slow down if you don’t want to ski into someone else.

Playing with the cards was fun as well, I’m getting better at it. I used to be one of the weaker players, but now I can keep up with the others. We were laughing almost all the time while playing the cards, it was probably the most fun I’ve ever had while playing that card game.

For dinner, we had French fries and steak. That’s a typical Belgian meal, if a Belgian hasn’t eaten it in his whole life he is not a true Belgian. It was really nice: the French fries were home-made and the steak was very good too. There was no dessert today, but I don’t really mind. We had already eaten more than enough.

It’s 10:35PM now, I’m about to go to bed. I need a good night’s sleep to be able to ski all day tomorrow.

Tuesday 4/7/2015: Sunburn

I was planning on skiing with my brother today, just the two of us. Unfortunately he had some trouble with his foot, so he was only able to ski for about half an hour. The others went all the way to a different mountain, just because they liked those ski slopes more. As my brother went to our apartment almost instantly, I had to go with the others. We ended up skiing half a day at that mountain and I did  three more hours at “our” mountain along with my mother.

When we arrived at home at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I noticed my neck had gotten sunburnt. It hurt a bit, but it wasn’t that bad. I should try to prevent it from happening again, as it’s obviously not healthy.

With our pick-nick, we had some really nice apple juice “avec gaz”. It’s something we always drink here, as we really like the local apple juice. It’s something you should really try if you come to Quatre Vallées.

I played some games on my phone, and that wraps up the whole day.

Wednesday 4/8/2015: Tired

I set my clock a bit later, so that I wouldn’t be as early compared to the others. It didn’t really work as planned: I was still the first one to arrive for breakfast.

The others kept on skiing all day, yet I kept up for only half a day. After lunch I was so tired I decided to stay at our apartment and rest for a while. After all, it wasn’t that bad to stay at the apartment as we had some scientific magazines lying on the table without anyone really reading it. Why wouldn’t I just keep myself occupied with some science? It’s important to stay up-to-date with science and technology nowadays, everything keeps on evolving at such a high speed…

I read about the Voyager 1 going interstellar after just under 30 years of flying around the sun, about what pictures it had taken and where it would end up. It’s stunning how a machine so old can still be travelling at 17 kilometres per second and still have enough battery life to communicate with the Earth for years to come, while a 1-year-old iPhone is already seen as outdated nowadays.

The first other skiers arrived here at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and talked with my dad (who doesn’t ski, yet comes with us anyways). I simply kept myself busy in my room (I put all of the pictures from my phone into different folders just to make my Gallery app look more clean, wrote yesterday’s and today’s sections and read some more of that scientific magazine).

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that we often (when we don’t pick-nick) eat lunch at “Chez Simon”, right next to the ski slope. From there, you have a really nice view of the other skiers. It’s a really nice place, it’s only sad that pick-nick is not allowed there.

I took some pictures of the view you get in the elevator that takes us all the way up to Savoleyres, just to show you guys what we see every morning around 9AM, when we are all geared up with our skis, ski boots, sticks and helmets.

Thursday 4/9/2015: Getting ready

Skiing went good, as always (apart from our first day, when the fog ruined it). We skied past a parked Snowcat, and I couldn’t help but take some pictures that show the whole thing with some more detail. I haven’t really taken such a close look at one of these myself before, so now I can look into the whole system a bit more in-depth. Its task is simple: flatten the snow before sunrise. The machine itself is a whole lot more complicated, I’ve already explained the way it works so I won’t go more in-depth today.

I also took a picture of the view from “Chez Simon”, the place we eat our lunch at. There’s some trees in front of the mountains, but I think that gives it an even more special feeling. It makes it feel... as if it could be your home. Everything here feels so special, from the snowy mountains to the small villages in the valleys.

For dinner, we started off with some toast with apple and cheese baked onto the bread (we put a piece of bread with some apple and cheese on top of it in the oven for a little while, so the apple got some extra flavour and the cheese nicely melted and looked even more delicious). The kids of a friend of one of us came over for a while, so that their parents could have some time to ski themselves. They ate almost all of our toast…

After that, we ate carrots, peas and pork. It tasted great the way my grandmother made it. When we finished dinner, a visitor arrived. He’s a good friend of the person that taught me how to ski. We had some fun that evening, he left at half past nine. I stayed up until ten o’clock.

Friday 4/10/2015: Last day of skiing

My parents went home very early in the morning, they were gone while we were still eating breakfast (I stayed here, my parents, brother and sister went home because my sister had another holiday planned and my brother had some trouble with his foot).

We went skiing very early today, and I kept on until 3 o’clock in the afternoon. I started off without sticks, but after lunch I took my sticks with me again. Skiing without sticks is exhausting but fun: it gives you a way more intensive feeling, you compensate the hill with your body instead of your sticks. I fell once today, but that was because of my own stupidity. I wasn’t skiing on the ski slope, but under the elevator called “Taillay”. When I arrived at the downside of the elevator, I went onto the ski slope with a jump and didn’t bend my knees in time to compensate the fall. I fell, but it didn’t hurt at all and I was able to get up almost instantly. It was the only time I fell this week.

While the other skiers were still drinking at Chez Simon, I went to the apartment because I was very tired after a long day of skiing. The warm shower felt very good after being in the snow for so long, it’s the same feeling you get when you take a nice warm shower after cycling in the rain. The only difference is that skiing is way more fun than cycling in the rain.

At the apartment, there were visitors. The people that are going to stay in the apartments we’re currently in are already staying in a hotel at the moment and they came by (my grandfather knows them, so why not). They were talking very loudly and fast, I got a headache because of that so I rested up for a while (my bed is in a different apartment, we rented the whole floor).

The evening went like normal apart from that, I packed my stuff and got everything ready so I could leave the morning after.

Saturday 4/11/2015: Looking back

Looking back at the holiday, I’m very satisfied. I had loads of fun and saw the person that taught me how to ski once again. The food was nice, the apartments were as good as they always are and we were able to ski all day every day the whole week without any serious accidents happening. How could it get better?

I did forget some stuff at the apartment, but we know the people that are staying there at the moment and they are going to take it with them after their vacation in Switzerland.

If you want to go somewhere beautiful during the winter, Quatre Vallées is a very good choice.