Today has been the first day of the Jungfrau ski season (save for a lift open in Murren for the last couple of weekends). There wasn’t much open today on this side of the valley, just a couple of lifts and their nearby pistes. I wasn’t arguing though; I was amazed to be skiing at all.
On Monday, we decided it was time to head for the hills, a couple of weeks earlier than planned originally. We booked our flight to Zurich and crammed a fortnight’s worth of commitments into a couple of days. On Thursday, we flew to Switzerland, knowing we would need to quarantine for ten days.
We arrived in Wengen in a snow storm which lasted into the evening. On Friday, the sun came out of hiding and it seemed our lockdown might be pretty grim.
Friday morning was spent catching up with the necessary paperwork, registering our quarantine with the Canton and booking test appointments at the doctor’s surgery. No sooner had we finished than Mrs IS received a text from a friend telling us that the quarantine requirements had been dropped . An hour later, we received an email from the Canton confirming that we had been released. So, with one bound we were free, as the old adventure novels used to say.
This morning it was raining in the village, but snowing hard above Allmend. It stayed like that all day. It didn’t matter, it was good to be on the hill at all. Skiline is not co-operating tonight, so instead of the day’s statistics, here are some top tips:
Top tip number one: If someone beats you to the only taxi at Wengen station, wait until it returns. Do not become impatient and attempt to navigate a luggage trolley through five centimetres of fresh snow; and
Top tip number two: If you pack a banana in your rucksack as a mid-morning snack, do not lean back on the chair lift until after you have eaten the banana.
We live and learn.
Idle thoughts from a mountain 