Unfortunately, we’re almost at that part of the holiday that everybody hates – the end. Skiing in Andorra was absolutely awesome, by far the best skiing that I’ve ever done – especially after all the snow we got on Thursday through Saturday.

We spent 12 painful hours in transit yesterday. First it was a four hour bus trip down the mountain, with Michael Schumacher as our bus driver. We were a bit concerned that driving so quickly down winding icy roads couldn’t be safe, but thankfully we all lived to tell the tale.

Next we waited in Girona for a few hours, then boarded a plane for our flight back to London. I have never seen a plane whose seats were more crammed together – just sitting still my knees were flush against the seat in front of me! At least no-one insisted on putting their chair back. Team BaM had to do it the toughest since they had to share one meal between the two of them – for the entire plane of about 300 passengers, there was only 3 vegetarian meals on board!

Finally after landing in London, we got a taxi service from Gatwick back to Hotel BaM – about an hour’s drive. I got flashbacks to Schumacher after our driver started dragging motorbikes off at the lights, but at least we were in a decent car and the roads weren’t icy. And in the end, it probably meant we got back faster.

Ahh, the joys of travel.

Anyway, our final night of holidays was nice and cruisy, and we were introduced to some delicious vegetarian fare – why I’ve never eaten a falafel before is beyond me! Today we’ll take the final leg of our journey, with a seven hour flight back to New York.

A huge thanks to Ben and Michelle our gracious hosts, and another huge thanks to our travelling buddies who helped make the holiday so fantastic – John and Kirstin, Pat, and Matt.

Photos will be up soon!

As mentioned previously, the snow coverage here in Andorra hasn’t been all the best. In fact, locals say it’s the worst season that they’ve had for as long as anyone can remember. Just our luck!

But despite the conditions, we’ve still been making the most of our time here. On Monday night, the tour company had organised a pub crawl, so we joined up with that to check out our local bars. One thing that I really appreciate about New York (and Australia) is that smoking is no longer permitted inside bars; I really wish they’d impose that restriction all around the world. Still, the bars were pretty good, especially Fat Alberts where we saw an absolutely amazing “cover band” from Ireland play. Their guitarist was mind-blowingly good, even pulling out a seamless cover of “Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits. Very, very impressive!

After our ski on Tuesday, Kristy and I joined Ben and Michelle at the “Wellness Spa” which is attached to our hotel. It was simply awesome – three hours of lazing about in spas, saunas, and pools, plus some other rooms with heated tile beds, aromatherapy, etc etc. My favourite part was sitting outside in the heated spa while it was snowing!

For Wednesday’s ski, Ben, Pat and I met up with the ski guide from the tour company – Simon. Basically, he is paid just to ski around the mountain with whomever wants to follow him. What a wicked job! Skiing with Simon was great experience – he took us to parts of the mountain that we previously had no idea how to get to.

It was freezing at the very top of the mountain, and the wind was incredibly strong. We did not enjoy sitting on the ski lifts in the wind – it’s soooo cold! The wind was also blowing in clouds and fog, which reduced our visibility to practically nothing. Add on the wind-burn factor, and we were pretty keen to high-tail it out of there! We spent our afternoon at the ski runs more local to our hotel, so we could make a quick getaway should the weather turn nasty.

And turn nasty it did – but realistically that’s a good thing. From sometime last night, and all day today, it has been SNOWING! We woke up to about 10cm of fresh snow on our balcony, and the entire mountain is looking much more white overall. Today was the first time I have skied on untouched powder snow – so deep in some parts that I couldn’t see my skis. It is such a different experience to skiing on groomed runs, and overall a much harder workout. And even though it meant we were basically skiing through a blizzard, it was well worth it!

With all this fresh snow and a forecast for a bright and sunny day, tomorrow will hopefully be the best day of skiing that I’ve ever had!

(Note: Kirsty and John, Ben and Michelle, and Kristy and I are going to do a combined post for Spain, so stay tuned for that one).

Today was our first day of skiing in Andorra. Unfortunately it hasn’t been the best season here, so the snow coverage is not as thick as it should be. But still, any snow is better than no snow!

Andorra is simply beautiful; with full coverage the skiing here would be amazing. Ben, Pat and I managed to find some decent snow on the other side of the main mountain, and had a few good runs today. I wore my heart rate monitor all day today, turns out that skiing really is a fairly intensive cardio workout; I burnt over 3,200 kCal in just over 5 hours of skiing!

Anyway it’s very late (just gone past midnight) so I should hit the sack; have to be up early for day two tomorrow!

Guess what we’ll be doing in a couple weeks time?

We fly out on Friday, and today is a public holiday – so that’s only four days of work left, w00t w00t!

Lucy and Michael roped us in to a last-minute trip to Hunter Mountain for a “spot of Sunday skiing” last weekend. Of course, all it takes to rope me is mumbling, “wanna go skiing?” – so they didn’t exactly have their work cut out for them. And, having had a decent time the last time we went to Hunter, we were happy enough to be going back.

When we arrived bright and early that Sunday morning, the mountain guide warned us that the temperatures would be sub-zero with windchill, – and he was talking in Fahrenheit degrees! Brr! In fact he went so far as to say, “keep an eye out for frostbite setting in amongst your friends. If you see little white dots developing somewhere on their skin, tell them to go inside to warm up, or they’ll lose that part of their body”. Double brr!

The freezing cold weather wasn’t the only thing working against us either. A big dump of rain had hit the mountain earlier in the work, which turned most of the snow to ice. Stay away from shiney spots in the snow, kids! Worse still, they ran a lot of the snow cannons all day, which meant we get coated in tiny globules of man-made snow each time we went through them – which was fairly unavoidable. (FYI: Man made snow is nothing like real snow – it’s small and icey instead of big and fluffy.)

Worst of all, Michael and I were both given dodgy Salomon skis. Being one of the bigger names in the industry, I was surprised at how terrible they were. The back-end of the skis just wouldn’t hold during turns, and the problem was only amplified by the abundance of ice. At first I thought it was just me, but when Michael complained about having the exact same problems that I did, yet the girls said nothing – we knew we were onto something. Michael had experienced the same problems in the past with Salomon skis, too! I’ll never ski on Salomon’s again; I’ll be asking for Rossignols instead.

So, not the best day skiing that I’ve ever had; but hey, a day of skiing is still a day of skiing, the company was spectacular, and we walked away uninjured – so I can’t really complain too much.

Fabia was kind enough to invite us along with her and Greg to a weekend away in Massachusetts. There we stayed with her lovely cousins Gute, Thuy, and their daughter Izabela. Many thanks to them all once again for being such generous hosts, and of course to Gute’s parents for the wonderful Brazillian style home-cooked meals, and for picking us up from the bus stop at 11 PM on Friday night!

On a side note: Gute and Thuy have become my new idols – practically everything in their house is “wired” (or connected wirelessly as the case may be) to their internal network. And best of all, not only do they have an XBox 360, but they’ve got a 60″ TV to play it on. Can you say, “addictive”? My “christmas list” just got a little bit longer!

But anyway, we all got up very early on Saturday morning to participate in one of my other favourite past-times – skiing! Our destination was Okemo mountain in Vermont. It was easily one of the best days of skiing that I’ve ever had – beautiful snow, spring-like conditions, and very short wait times at the lifts. The runs were perfectly graded for our levels of expertise, and for most of the day we did the blue runs together as a group. The mountain was also one of the largest ones that I have skiied on – it took Greg and I about 10 – 15 minutes to ski all the way from top to bottom without stopping, and we were going pretty fast. (Boy were our legs sore after that!)

Unfortunately, we didn’t have a camera with us, so no piccies to show .

Of course, one day of skiing is never enough, and now that my appetite has been whetted, I’m looking out for other opportunities to indulge again before the season is out. Anyone interested?

Last night I had a dream that I was on a skiing holiday. I’m not sure where it was, and I was a bit confused by the people who I was there with (it was all the people I went skiing with last year, plus a whole bunch of people from high school, and lots of people from work). But still, a skiing dream is a skiing dream.

Now, I reckon it’s a sign. I’m trying to save up my holidays for my honeymoon in November this year, but clearly I am supposed to go skiing in the meantime! Who knows what the consequences would be if I ignored such an important dream? Yes, I think skiing should definately be on the cards this year. If only I had more money…