The dogs are gutted to find that they are not going to be part
of the second half of our holiday double header. They realise this I suppose
when we pull up at the gates of the Premier Pets Hotel. We depart towards
Heathrow as MD loudly reintroduces himself to the other inmates. ‘Career of
Evil’ is still playing as we drive down.
Security isn’t noticeably tighter at Heathrow, which is a
surprise and possibly a disappointment to L who had hoped to get through a
novel in the security queue.
The first night (Tuesday) is spent at the Holiday Inn near Zurich
Airport which is the same place we stayed in last year. Last year it took us about
an hour to find it, this year I know exactly where it is but still get lost in
the one way system.
The next morning we head off in our hired Ford C-Max to
Laax. The C-Max wasn’t my choice, we were upgraded by Hertz and given a car that
is not only larger than we needed but also an automatic. Bit of a major
downgrade in my book. Somehow I suspect an automatic (and a diesel one at that)
is not the best car for ascending mountain passes and I am not wrong.
We spend two days skiing in the Flims-Laax-Falera which we
have visited before back in 2005 but we can barely remember it. Last time we
stayed in Laax itself this time we are in Flims where we are surprised to find that
we are the only guests staying in the hotel. It is scarily eerie with echoes of
‘The Shining’ as we let ourselves back into a deserted hotel after going out for
a meal. All the staff have gone home and they have simply left us with a phone
number of someone in the next village to call in case of emergency.
Funnily enough the next day a coach party arrives and the place
goes from dead to rocking all night in a blink of an eye.
On Friday we move onto Arosa to a hotel that looks more like
a hostel but is at least occupied by more than just us. We haven’t visited Arosa
before but they have recently added a new cable car that links the resort to Lenzerheide
which we have been to a couple of times.
Arosa is slightly higher than Flims so the snow is less
spring like, however over in Lenzerheide on the non-sunny side of the mountain
it’s a different ball game entirely with harder snow producing some much faster
pistes.
Throughout the week the weather is sunny and the promised
rain never appears. L wins ‘Fall of the Week’ with the better of her two falls which
was an impressive and painful face plant, so I’m told. I didn’t see either and
as I didn’t manage to muster an entry myself I had to concede defeat to L.
Throughout the week lunch is usually liquid with cake, we do
have some very impressive cakes, and evening meal is usually the cheapest we
can get. This is usually pizza or pasta but we also managed to discover the humble
rösti, which is also quite cheap. The prices of ‘normal’ food were simply eye
watering along with all but the cheapest bottles of wine. We moan about the mark
up on wine here but the Swiss seem to have no problem paying £30 for a bottle
of wine that they get in their own supermarkets for £5. When not drinking the wine,
it was Erdinger Weissbier for me preferably the Dunkel version but this serious
starts to grate after a while. Erdinger is German, the only Swiss beer I had was Calanda,
brewed locally at Chur, and I’m still recovering from that experience.
Our last night is back in the airport hotel at Zurich before
flying home to the boys.
(Monday 4th April)
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