To Ski or Not to Ski

One picture can easily describe last week in Germany for me.



When I moved to the UK I had a list of several things I wanted to do in Europe before I left (I may share my list at another time) which included hitting the slopes at some point. I had always wanted to snowboard/ski in Europe but it was always too expensive and too far to go for questionable conditions. Any snow holiday in Europe would need to be booked far in advance and who knows if there would be snow by the time the trip came. Several weeks ago I was scheduled to come to Nurnberg, Germany to work at a trade show. I figured this would be a great opportunity to stay the weekend and hit the slopes. I emailed the sales team in our Munich office and before I knew it we were all set to go. Someone in the sales office had booked rooms for us in a guest house in the small village of Fischbachau, where he lives, and it would only be a short 15-minute drive to the resort near his house. He even offered to lend us his season passes so we wouldn't have to pay a dime for lift tickets.

The week of the trip came and it was just a disaster. The person who planned the trip for us got scheduled to go to a meeting in the San Jose office. Although we were able to meet him the night before he left, we were completely on our own to head to the slopes. The slopes near Munich also had not seen any snow for the last 5-6 weeks so the conditions were not going to be great and everyone else from the local office backed out as well. So here we were in this small village on our own with no snow while the person who planned the trip was enjoying 100" base at Heavenly Ski Resort.

The next morning we headed to the resort to find the conditions had further degraded. The mountain with no snow turned into a rainy mess of mud and little snow. We'd come all this way though so we weren't going to turn around now. Seeing as the conditions weren't promising, I decided I may as well take some ski lessons and spend my day challenging myself. I've snowboarded for nearly 10 years so snowboarding in horrible conditions wouldn't be any fun. I rented some skis and was assigned a 19-year-old recent high-school graduate as a teacher who looked like she couldn't be bothered to teach an old grandma like me in her hungover state. You could tell that she hadn't the faintest idea why I hadn't been skiing since I was two, like her, and why did I think I could learn now. You'll love the irony that her name was Theresa as well. I decided to just be happy that I had a private lesson with ski rental for well less than I would pay at any resort in Lake Tahoe. We went through most of my lesson and I was progressing fairly well, even Theresa commented that she didn't believe I'd only skied one before. We were using the small t-bar lift on the side of the slopes and were headed down for the last run of my lesson. I got a bit distracted and let go of the t-bar too early. Theresa said I could get back on the t-bar lift if I grabbed it quickly which just turned into me missing the t-bar and laying splat on the wet snow. Before I knew it the next t-bar grabbed onto my ski and instead of flipping off, it pulled my left leg all the way back until I heard my knee pop. At this point I was laying on the wet snow unable to move, trying not to cry out of sheer pain, and trying to figure out how I was going to get down the stupid mountain. None of this impressed Theresa and I don't think she'll be teaching any old ladies like me anytime soon.

The snow mobile finally came to collect me and brought me down to their small hut where I waited for the ambulance to take me to the emergency room. I was just happy to hear that this tiny village had a doctor let alone a real hospital. I was brought to the ER where I had some x-rays taken and a very stoic doctor poked around my leg a bit. In the end 2 hours on the slopes cost me 3 hours in the ER, 228 euros, a strained ligament, and a very injured ego (for everything else there's Mastercard). For the most part I'm doing fine, just hobbling around a bit like an invalid but I'm able to drive and get around. I probably need to have an MRI taken at some point. The gods are definitely trying to tell me something considering I've skied twice in my life and each time I've injured a knee (I tore my right ACL the first time). Although I've never had a snowboarding related injury (knock on wood). I really do have to thank my coworker, Stefano, for being such a great help to me. He ended his ski day early to come to the ER with me and even bought me a hot chocolate :-)

Of course my fantastic weekend didn't end there. My friends, the Beckers, happened to be in Munich at the same time so I went down to spend Saturday with them since I wasn't flying out until the evening. Mrs. Becker is five months pregnant so it was great to see them since last I saw her was pre-pregnancy. We had dinner Friday night and had a full day of sightseeing planned for Saturday, including a visit to the BMW Museum. We got up on Saturday, had a massive breakfast at the hotel and headed down to the Marienplatz area to see the Glockenspiel chime at 10:30 am. We walked around a bit and within 30 minutes the blue sky turned to pouring rain, to torrential hail, and finally to snow. We didn't have any shelter and it didn't help to be running around on my bad knee. On top of that we ducked into the tourist office where we found a brochure for the BMW Museum and read that the museum had not opened yet (it's been under renovation for a couple years now).

The kicker to all this was that during our tour of the Munich Residenz, I received a text message from British Airways informing me that my 9pm flight was canceled and that I should call to make other flight arrangements. I quickly called British Airways and Stefano and we rushed to Munich airport to try and catch a 4pm flight. Due to the weather the airport had closed down for several hours so there were massive queues of angry customers with no place to go. Luckily we made it to the airport on time and our flight was only delayed to 5pm. This was unlike some customers whose 9am flight was canceled, then got rebooked on the 1pm flight which turned up 5 minutes after our flight started boarding.

All in all I'm happy to be home safe and sound while warm and dry. I'm not too much worse for the wear and the few pictures I took are on the right.