Ski Trip Pt I

Today I am at the snow. I left home yesterday morning at 6am and arrived here around 4pm. Surprisingly the day did not feel as long as it could have.

LB, Baby and I drove up with LB's brother, Paz. This is a family trip you see. Their family. Four bedrooms, 13 people. Compared to last year it feels positively relaxed and spacious. And though there has been sisterly bickering and spousal bickering, it is fine.

Shit, if you want you can imagine it is just like Dan in Real Life.


Or any other film where some large, delightful, kooky, fraught family gets together and there are in-laws and laughs and tears.

You can imagine that. But thank Christ it is not like that. God, can you imagine anything worse?

So we left yesterday at around 6. By 10 we had stopped four times: coffee and croissant; feed baby to coax him to sleep + fuel; investigation of suscpicious noise (flapping strap from roof racks); and wee.

Thank God that Paz is kind of a stickler and bought snow chains. LB is the most casual of guys and said to me a few days ago, I've got chains but they won't fit the car. Once he lived on a mountain. Now he thinks he knows everything about mountains. One of these things he knows is that no-one uses snow chains. Or rather he thinks that he is king of the mountain and that nothing more needs to be thought about.

When I told him that his mother had told me it was snowing on the mountain he suggested this information was unreliable because she lives in Far North Queensland.

Two minutes past the sign that tells you to put on your snow chains LB conceded the car had no traction and that maybe, just maybe we'd need snow chains. This is what the road looked like:



Once we got to the gate of the town we were stopped by a guy who told us the road to where we were going was closed because a coach (which has the sole job of driving around this mountain resort ski town) was bogged because it did not have snow chains on! We had two choices. We could either take that road and sit in traffic for an hour while it was cleared OR we could take another road that was slightly less direct but get us to the house in 5 minutes. Umm. That guy has been on this mountain way to long.