It was a great holiday, run by the Ski Club of Great Britain. I discovered that this organisation originated from a time when keen Britons lived in ski resorts, and the Club linked them together so they could visit each others' resorts and ski together with local knowledge. Times have changed, but the focus is still on higher ability and more technical skiing (and snowboarding). I joined one of their holidays in 2014, and this was a similar one that also included three days instruction. On the other three days we were supposed to be guided by a Ski Club Leader, but he turned out to be an instructor too and so we got instructed on all six days, and often more by the Leader than by the official instructor.
The Italian resort Folgarida is a long way from Milan airport with more than three hours on the bus to the hotel, which was right on the piste but well away from the village, which meant they tried hard to put on entertainments in the evenings. One night there was a pianist/singer, another night we had a local cheese and meat tasting, but I missed much of the evening activity because after dinner I'd generally had enough and went to bed.
There were 14 of us including the Leader, and what an interesting group of people they were. A pilot, an economist at the Bank of England, a Forensic Psychologist, a BP executive, a retired owner of a children's nursery who had previously been a ballet dancer, a retired photographer, a BBC website editor, a couple of retired lawyers. Mealtime conversation was a great deal more stimulating than what I'm used to at work. I got on well with most, but not at all with two of them.
The skiing went well - I was initially put in the more advanced group, but I switched for the last two days because the numbers worked better and it got me away from one of the people I didn't get on with, which is when I discovered I didn't get on with the second one. Unlike the previous Ski Club holiday we weren't forced off piste all the time, but did a very little bit of off piste much more successfully than before. One of the highlights was a long quiet gently sloping run through the woods, another was the opportunity to have one's picture taken at the start of a World Cup downhill slope, and a third was an interesting local liqueur called 'Bombardino'.
As always I made a trip to a local supermarket where there was no interesting chocolate, so instead I bought some interesting pasta with a recipe for local dish 'pizzoccheri'. I also bought some of the delicious cheese and salami from the hotel cheese-and-meat tasting. The food in general was good, with a couple of oddities thrown in. We were given menus each evening to choose the following evening's dishes without much explanation, so one of my main meal choices turned out to be three very large (~250g) pieces of cheese, accompanied only by a teaspoon of honey and a teaspoon of mustard. The cheeses were very tasty, but not what I would have chosen for dinner had I known. On another night the 'grilled cheese with caramelised onion' turned out to be just that - a small browned onion on a plate next to two slices of cheese that were slightly melted. Luckily I hadn't chosen that option.
At the end of the week my skiing ability was rated exactly the same as it had been four years ago, which surprised me because I feel a great deal more competent now than I did then. Then another 13-hour journey to get home, where I have been feeling a little sad at the lack of interesting people and their stories, but happy that I have another ski trip planned for six weeks' time.
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