In order to make up for not having written anything much about last year's trip to Solden, the fact that there's a WiFi connection here in Kaprun means I can attempt to do an in situ day-by-day update on the snowboarding trip. Lucky, eh ?
We've just pulled up after a fairly horrid trip over – I only made the Eurostar by a matter of moments, after traffic in London was shocking and the tube had severe delays… anyway, we got on the train, headed to the bar, and drank the train out of Duvel. Wha hey !
Stopping in Brussels for a quick beer, we then boarded another train to Koln. So far so good, and happily this train also sold Duvel. So we drank all of that too.
Koln was interesting – we had a couple of hours to kill so Richie said “Wanna see the funky cathedral ?”. Assuring me that we would have time and it wouldn't take so long that we'd miss the train, I agreed to go see this cathedral. We step out of the train station front entrance, and there's the cathedral. If they ever sell it they'll get a few bob for it – very handy for transport connections.
We had a quick go on the electric trainset thing in the station; I think Richie got a kick out of being in charge of stuff.
We grabbed a bite & another pint, and then realised that we had 20 minutes until our train left, so we scarfed that down and bolted to platform 8, where we were greeted with no train.
About this point things got silly, and it became a bit like being in England. Our train was delayed 60, then 90, then 120 minutes (mind you, this afforded us the chance to go get more beer). Eventually (& after meeting a variety of cranky Germans) we swapped platforms and got on our train, which proceeded to take forever.
Gripping story, that.
So we've met a trainspotter from Leeds, we had a quick bite and a soda of some description (pictured below, across the road from the Istanbul Kebab Shop in Zell Am See), and now we're at the chalet. Yee haa. The rest of the gang are godknowswhere, because even though our train was 4 hours late, their planes were later.
There's not a lot of snow about, and in fact it looks more like spring than snow season. We briefly mooted the idea that there was snow there, but the locals had hidden it all under giant rolls of retractable turf.
Hopefully tomorrow we'll get out onto the glacier.