Skiing in Laax

I went on a ski trip to Laax between Mar 1st and Mar 9th together with Rune, Peter, Amy, Joe and Theo. We started driving from the Hague very early in the morning. Wouter was supposed to go with us, but he had car trouble, so he decided not to come with us.

The drive was pretty smooth until we hit southern Germany. We tried to beat the queues by driving several Umwäge, and by trying to use the traffic feature of the Navigation units in the cars to avoid the worst of it. Overall I don't think it helped us much. The road trip to Laax was supposed to take 9 hours. In the end we spent around 13, driving through Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

We were staying in a small family-run hotel, which was very cheap. We paid 722 Euro for a whole week for room and board plus lift passes. The food was OK, and the hotel wasn't out of the way compared to the other hotels around there, so overall it was a good deal.
One problem was that we had to take ski shuttles to the slopes every morning.This was less convenient than staying on the slopes like we did last year. Having to ride the bus probably took away half an hour of skiing on each end .

We were worried the first day as it was very windy, and they only kept the bottom pistes open. These had rotten snow and brown patches, so we accidentally did some mud skiing.
Luckily more stuff opened up on the next day, so we got to see more of the area. It turned out to be a fairly big resort, with lots of pistes at varying altitudes.


There was some hilarity with the naming of pistes and ridges in the area. Seemed like half the area was named something with "crap" in the name, so naturally everyone had to take a picture in front of the "Crap Bar".

Rune had to stop early on most of the days, because he had to do schoolwork (for his master's), but on most days the rest of us would wind down at the after-ski bars at the bottom of the pistes.

One nice thing about the Laax resort...they had bubbles on most of the exposed chairlifts, and the longest one actually had heated seats. This was a good morale-booster when it was foggy and windy everywhere.

We did a lot of traveling around the area, as someone in the group wanted to make sure he had run all the pistes (checked all the boxes, sort of). This was annoying, since we left some really good areas for crap ones just because these were areas we had not yet tried.

Weather-wise we had two days of bad weather, two day of gray so-so, and two days of extremely good weather. We had a perfect day on Thursday, and we spent all of it going down black pistes in the sun all the way until the pistes closed.

Lunch was always good. There were lots of very good food at the cafeterias - german style. Nothing like some bratwurst and beer to raise your spirits.


We moved beyond the cafeterias and ate at a "gourmet restaurant" on Friday . This was a mistake. They cooked our wine and didn't understand that this was a problem, their service was slow, but the food was excellent. Having imbibed lots of wine, we were really buzzed before going down towards the village of Falera. I'm not sure if it was the alcohol, or that we finally found our skiing legs, but the run was so good that we rushed back up to do one final run before the pistes closed. Truly a great day of skiing...

Memorably quotes:
"My buns feel happy!"


On the return trip we had decided to drive through France, through the Vosges, stopping in a small town called Epernay in the Champagne-district. We visited the visitor center of the Champagne maker called "Mercier" and got a tour of the cellars. In the evening we had dinner at a fancy restaurant, having a nice, if somewhat rushed meal (overzealous waiter almost hovering next to our table)

Next morning Rune and me drove back to the Hague, stopping for breakfast at a roadside cafe, rather than paying the 20 Euros that the hotel wanted to charge us...

Pictures are here