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.