A perfect day!

Skiing is one of those high risk activities where having a combination of great snow and weather and no crowds almost never happens but today it did.  Because it is 'change over' day there was almost nobody on the slopes which makes skiing so much more enjoyable and relaxing.  We had decided to make the most of our opportunity and head over to Federia which is over the mountain from where we are and only has two red runs open, the one we spent some time on because it was quite a nice, if awkward due to it's camber, run and the pleasing thing is that we are now actually skiing the red runs as opposed to just surviving them.

Getting a bit ahead of myself so back to the morning, we started off with a lesson with Ivan who has turned out to be an excellent instructor and we have all made at least some progress.  I even received some compliments from Ivan which I am choosing to take at face value but it takes concentration to get the position, weight and timing just right and if I am on steep icy slopes almost everything goes out of the window and I regress.  All of us really enjoyed the lesson this morning, I think because we are all skiing much better and with the slopes being just about devoid of other skiers so one didn't need to keep an eye open for unruly Poles bearing down on one.

Lesson done we took our leave from Ivan and after a quick hot chocolate, with cream of course, we took the bus up to Carosello 3000 where we met up with everyone else bar Gary who was inexplicably missing.  At the top there is another huge restaurant with prices to match the lack of competition where Caron and I shared a salad and a tiramisu cake which was absolutely delicious.

After spending a very quite some time on Federia where Anna amazed all of us with how much progress she has made from never having ski'd at all to be able to cope with a red slope reasonably well.

The two purple people eaters (song) having fun at the top of Federia before we took the red slope back home which was a whole different ball game because it was only one snow plough wide which is fine where it was reasonably flatish but where it got quite steep it was quite tricky what with faster skiers coming flashing past as well as slower skiers constrained by the width of the piste even more.  We all made it without incident though, a little excitement to end the day.

It was Keyser's turn to make supper and this alternating of which family is to make the evening meal is really working out well because it means that everyone is getting a break of at least 3 nights before needing to make another meal.

It would appear that Rob and Nikki's warnings about the Poles was not hyped up, when we got to the bottom of Carosello 3000 there were lines of buses bearing Polish registrations so it looks like they have arrived en-masse.  The apartment above us has been occupied and I don't know if the building just isn't soundproof but they were making quite a racket until quite late which doesn't bode well for the rest of the week.  Supper was great with lots of laughter and jokes and it was really nice to return to the lighter side of life even if it was only for a day.