too much of one thing is never good…
at the moment I am doing some more work to the studio, but right now I am taking a much-needed break from painting, building cupboards, shelves and sweeping dust off every possible surface, before sweeping it once again. I’m planning to take some images of the studio tomorrow, for the Plough Studios website and for my own satisfaction too, having spent so long decorating it..
a few weeks ago though, I spent some time in the Black Forest and Austria, in Ischgl specifically, to do some cross-country and downhill skiing, so I thought I’d reflect on that first – I have never seen so much snow…never. Perhaps this sounds like an exaggeration, but there was 90cm of snow in one day the day before we arrived and double that again in the following couple of days. Apparently schools in the Black Forest were shut for the first time in a very, very long time, apparently over 60 years? I can’t recall exactly, my German is limited. But that didn’t stop us from doing some cross-country skiing though:
the forest was absolutely stunning, but it was hard work pushing through all of the snow and there was some pretty strong winds too, which were causing drifts up to 8 feet deep. We decided to go for the ‘long circuit’ and whilst it doesn’t sound too tough, three hours of skiing in those conditions almost broke me. Probably in part because I am a rubbish, but a learning, cross country skier. I’ll keep trying, but keeping up with Meli was hard enough.
a day later we were off to Ischgl for three days of downhill skiing and snowboarding. The weather forecast wasn’t looking so good for us, with severe weather warnings for the night and morning we were due to leave. Sure enough the wind picked up some more and by midnight the snow had started falling heavily, plus it was blowing a gale. From inside the house it sounded horrific. We loaded up the car that evening and hoped that leaving very early the next morning would help.
we were up at 5am for the three hour drive, to find that about 3 feet of snow had fallen and that it was still falling heavily. I had to dig the car out of the garage after ploughing our way out of the house, snow up to our waists, my hand later getting stuck to the shovel handle in the freezing temperatures whilst digging the car out of the garage, and almost freezing to death as I pushed the car onto the road before we drove slowly on our way along roads which were a feet deep in snow, probably more. It was scary stuff, but we were lucky; it continued to snow heavily all that day and by 9am cars had become stranded on the roads and it turns out people weren’t rescued for up to 22 hours!..we were just ahead of all of this mayhem and made it to Austria in a cautious 5 hours, where strangely there was very little snow.
what followed was a great three days of skiing, Meli snowboarding, in fresh powder and a fair amount of clear blue sky. I’ve never been skiing in Austria but loved Ischgl and all of the German beer and singing in the evenings – we’ll definitely be back
it’s fair to say that Meli is an exceptional snowboarder too, but fortunately as there wasn’t so much uphill skiing through 3 feet of snow, as with the cross country skiing, I didn’t have any problems, in fact on the flatter end-of-runs it was me pulling Meli along with a ski pole, which was a relief after looking like such a numpty on cross-country skis
this could have been the last trip for a while, with an exciting and large photography project on the horizon… it’s going to be a summer of hard work and I bet you anything it’ll be one of the hottest on record
