Birthday Weekend - Part II

Given all I had been through on Friday, and having yet to decide whether I would actually make the trip to Switzerland after all, I decided to head back to the office on Friday night to join my group in what has become a weekly tradition – the Friday drink. This particular week it was (somewhat bastardized) caipirinhas made by a new manager who hails from Brazil. Afterwards, part of the group headed to a relatively new restaurant called “beef bar” where they serve real American steaks (which are actually shipped over from the U.S. twice a week). Europe is definitely not known for good steaks, but this place is (comparatively, at least) awesome. After some really good steak and some really good wine, everyone called it a night. I still was unsure of my plans, but set an alarm for an early wake-up call anyway. My bags were still packed, so I could make a game time decision in the morning.

When I awoke to the alarm sounding at 6:45am, I certainly wasn’t anxious to get up and hit the road. But after a few minutes of internal debate, I decided there was no good reason not to head south. I had taken Monday off and knew that if I stayed in Luxembourg, I would kick myself for not doing something more exciting for my birthday. However, with my recently acquired fear of driving in the snow, I decided it would probably be best to leave my loaner car at the France/Switzerland border and ride the train to my final destination. So I drove to Basel, Switzerland (~3.5hrs), parked the car and bought a train ticket to Lauterbrunnen, which, for a little extra, also included a lift pass for the Jungfrau region, where I planned to ski on Sunday. The next 2.5hrs were spent reading, napping and enjoying the gorgeous Swiss countryside/mountains from the comfort of the train. This was much better than driving and well worth the money for the train ticket.

I hadn’t booked a hotel room in Lauterbrunnen, but had scoped out a few places online that supposedly had availabilities as of Saturday morning. When I arrived, I stopped by the information office in town to inquire as to where those hotels were located. While I was there, the lady working the desk called the hotels on my list to confirm that rooms were still available, which they basically weren’t (at least not for the price I had seen and was willing to pay). She called a couple of other places, though, and found one that had rooms available in my price range. I was off to check in at the Hotel Jungfrau and then to rent skis from the local ski shop. The rest of the evening I spent “sightseeing,” which consisted of walking up and down the one street in town while it was still light outside. I went to the grocery store to buy provisions for the weekend, ate wienerschnitzel at my hotel and had a quick beer at the only pub in town before turning in for the night.

I got an early start on Sunday morning, as I was pretty sure it would be my only day skiing and it was a good 45min train ride to the top of the mountain. I made it to the slopes around 9am, stuffed my bag in a locker and starting skiing. It had been about 5-6 years since I had been on skis, so I took it easy at first and went down a “beginner” slope, which ended up taking me pretty much all the way down the mountain, where I had to catch another 30min train to get back to where I started. The rest of the day, I hit as many “intermediate” runs as I could, traversing the mountain multiple times and taking in the beautiful scenery until the clouds and snow settled in and I couldn’t see more than 200-300 yards in front of me.

I don’t know if it was the lighting, the fact that I was above tree-line (and therefore everything was white with very little contrast) or my old eyes, but I have to admit that I struggled a bit on the slopes, especially with the subtle undulations that were prevalent on most, if not all, of the runs. More than once my feet dropped out from beneath me when there was an unseen dip in the slope. I also had a little scare when I ended up in deep powder on the wrong side of a trail marker, where I quickly fell down and lost a ski. It took a good 10 minutes to eventually find the missing ski in the powder, during which time I was very concerned that my day had ended at 1:30pm and I would be paying for a lost ski. Otherwise, I had a great day and got my money's worth by skiing almost non-stop from 9am to 3:30pm.

For my birthday dinner, I went to the restaurant at one of the hotels I had identified in my research and had a fantastic meal, followed by a bottle of champagne in my hotel room and an online chat with a good friend back in Dallas.

Monday morning was absolutely perfect (the sun was shining and it was relatively warm) and I was a bit upset to be leaving. I took the train to Interlaken, stopped for a couple hours to walk around and eat lunch, then continued on to Basel to pick up my car and drive back to Luxembourg. Quite a bit of traveling for only one day of skiing, but still worth the trip to celebrate my golden birthday and try to forget about the little “incident” with which I started out the weekend.

Oh yeah, and I made some red velvet birthday cupcakes when I got home Monday night.

Birthday Weekend - Part I

For weeks I tried to come up with a plan to do something cool for my birthday. I went to Belize to scuba dive when I turned 30 last year and, while turning thirty-one isn’t usually all that special, it happens to be my “golden birthday” (turning 31 on the 31^st) and I wanted to celebrate accordingly. I seriously considered using frequent flyer miles to make a surprise visit to Dallas/Arlington and spend the weekend with family and friends that I haven’t seen in a long 3 months – an idea that was especially tempting when I heard that Walt Wilkins, Autumn, and Bobby Duncan (among others) would be performing at an all-day concert in Fort Worth on Sunday. But almost everyone here thought it would be crazy to go back for that short of a time (I was looking at Friday to Tuesday) and, in the end, I guess I agreed (sorry, Mom).

As I attempted to define my options for travelling in Europe, I was provided with plenty of suggestions and I considered everything from Ireland to Africa to the Canary Islands, but I just couldn’t decide what to do. Most of the people I hang out with were going to be either out of town or working over the weekend and, as I wanted to make a long weekend out of it, it was going to be hard to find someone willing to take days off of work anyway. It was setting up to be a solo trip, which didn’t really bother me too much – after all, I’ve been there before on my post-graduation trek around the Eastern U.S.

Throughout the decision-making process, I kept feeling pulled toward the mountains and I finally settled on a ski trip to the Alps. While I would have preferred to escape the cold for a few days, that was proving to be much more challenging (and likely much more costly) than a 5-6hr road trip to higher elevations (where at least I could take advantage of the cold and snow). So skiing it was…but where? Once again, I was inundated with suggestions, this time for various ski resorts in the French and Swiss Alps. With the World Economic Summit being held at my first choice (Davos, Switzerland), I finally settled on the Jungfrau region near Interlaken, Switzerland. The plan was to drive down on Friday (29 January) to settle in, rent skis, etc., and then ski Saturday, Sunday and possibly part of Monday before heading home. But as seems to happen all too often, my plans were rearranged…

I had a feeling it would eventually happen. After a number of close calls, my luck was running out - I just didn’t know when or where it finally would. Yes, from the first days of snow and ice in Luxembourg, I knew my company car was destined to make a trip to the body shop sooner or later. And it was as if Mother Nature wouldn’t turn off the snow until it finally happened.

Before I could leave town on Friday morning, I needed to make one last trip to the office to send an e-mail and pick up some paperwork to take with me. To avoid being seen on my day off, and in an effort to get out of town at a reasonable time, I went to the office around 6:45am to take care of my business. As was becoming fairly typical, it had snowed overnight and the roads were slick, but I had no problems driving to the office (partly because there were very few people on the roads at that time). The return trip home, around 8:30am, for last-minute packing/trip preparations, however, was a different story entirely.

My apartment is less than 5km from the office, and I was only about 1km from home when it happened. The 4 cars in front of me were stopping behind a bus and, though I should have had plenty of time and space to stop as well, my car was having none of it. I knew immediately that my big hunk of metal was going to slide into the back of someone else’s big hunk of metal if I didn’t perform some kind of evasive maneuvers. And the last thing I wanted was to have to deal with the headache that comes with hitting another person. I would gladly have run my car straight into the ditch on the side of the road, but in that ditch were 1) a very sturdy-looking metal sign marking the entrance to the village; 2) some equally sturdy-looking wooden posts; and 3) a row of medium-sized trees. My best (and only) hope was to thread the needle between the next car and the sign/posts/trees, but, unfortunately, the Audi A6 doesn’t lend itself to threading anything very well.

By the time the car had come to a rest on the other side of the posts/trees, almost the whole passenger side of the car was scratched (including a shattered side mirror) and the back left quarter-panel was crushed. The latter happened when the rear end of the car fishtailed to the left and made contact with the right rear corner of the car I was trying so desperately to avoid. The lady driver of that car was pretty shaken up, but she wasn’t hurt and there was not much damage done to her car. In the end, I was able to avoid a front-end collision with another vehicle (or a tree) and the damage could have been much worse than it was.

Pictures of the damage (though they don't really do it justice):

Obviously, I did not make it out of town on Friday. I won’t go into too many (more) details, but I spent much of the rest of the day with my secretary as she helped me with all of the insurance paperwork and escorted me to the dealership to drop off the car in exchange for a loaner, which we didn’t receive until almost 5:30pm. One thing we did learn through the process, however, was that my car was not equipped with winter tires (as it should have been). That (in addition to my being from Texas and rarely driving in winter conditions) may help to explain all the problems I have had with the snow/ice here.

Clearly, this was not how I wanted to spend my day off and the first day of my birthday weekend.

More to come...