Whiteout

Well, we survived the skiing holiday! When we arrived it was sunny and the snow was a little thin in places, but from day two it snowed pretty much continuously, dumping at least a metre of new snow overnight and then topping it up each day with a few more centimetres. The advantage was that the snow was soft and when you fell in it, it didn't hurt! The disadvantage was that it was hard work to ski in and you needed to be fit and the surface was a bit unpredictable, causing me to fall a lot! We all ended up sitting in a lot of snow! We also had one day of total whiteout; where the light conditions and in this case the falling snow, meant that it was impossible to make out the contours of the slopes or the edges of the pistes. You couldn't really tell whether the slope was steep or flat until you were on it! One thing this seemed to do to most of us was to make us feel a bit sick. This feeling also seemed to last a few hours after skiing. Apparently it is a kind of motion sickness that affects one in ten skiers (although in our case it was over half the group!). (And no, it was not due to too much alcohol the night before!