Uhlfelder News

1-19-2018 — Drive from Munich to Lienz Austria

Today at noon we got on a bus and made our way to Austria. There are 14 guests, two guides and Garrott Kuzzy, who is a former Olympic XC skier and put the trip together. Ten days of XC skiing already looks too daunting to everyone so they are talking about alpine skiing for at least a couple of days. I brought my alpine clothes and googles so that’s fine with me.

Three of the trip goers is a couple with their daughter in her 20s from Carbondale and looked really familiar. Turns out the mom has been at our house and played the piano with Anne and her piano group.

There is a lot of snow here compared with Aspen. I’m not sure it’s as much as advertised but will know more tomorrow.

Everyone seems nice and on their best behavior. There are at least two other people on the trip who seem to speak some German. One guy was an exchange student and I don’t know what the other’s story is. I guess I speak some too. It seems clear that a trip to Germany and Austria would attract people who speak and want to practice the language (German, Bavarian, Austrian, etc…).

We passed Kitzbuhel and the skiing looked good. The most-famous World-cup Hahnenkamm downhill is taking place, but we only saw it from the bus windows (our timing is off). The race is tomorrow. There will probably be 100,000 people on the course and it’s an hour from where we’re staying.

It’s just the Hahnenkamm—no big deal

Our first group dinner was tonight. I am still jet lagged and listening to people made me even more tired. I understand why beer is so popular. We were warned that the hotels all have saunas and we should expect that everyone will be nude – sounds gross to me.

There are two wax experts that will do the ski waxing for us, a husband and wife team, who are cute, tall, and speak English. They were hired to wax and know how to do it! They really care and are waxing people’s skis for a world-cup race team. Wow. There goes my main excuse for a middling performance.

I’m not used to or terribly in touch with the whole “group” thing and wonder how long it will be before I am so sick of people that I’m so sick of people. One couple from Alaska had their luggage lost. Kind of a big deal when you’re on a ski trip. The people are all separated by at most two degrees of separation and everyone knows someone or knows someone who knows someone else, as you see. Pretty insular. In fact, I don’t think they should have children since they may be born with cross-country skis on and only talk about waxing or how awful trump is.

The group thing could go another way — maybe we’ll all be getting naked in the sauna and bond as a group. Seems unlikely.

(put sauna photo here)

Using the internet is painfully slow until everyone is done watching porn, so I have to wait until that’s over to upload this blog.  Jet lag helps me keep stupid hours.

We are in Lienz at the Goldener Fisch hotel   It’s nice and clean with large rooms and I have new slippers from the hotel.