Andorra Part 2 – February 2016

~Wednesday~
Pretty sure it stopped snowing once we went to sleep, as there wasn’t much more when we woke up. But that’s OK, at least we had some freshies!  We were up early and on the first chairs up, and had a pretty good day. Visibility came and went, and it occasionally snowed a bit. Again, we met Erin and Chris for some afternoon boarding.

Thursday
No freshies, but we got going early again. There was a lot of low cloud around, just hanging out in the valleys, and generally being annoying. Couldn’t see the ground really, it made boarding not as fun, so we headed to a little bar near one of the lifts, for vin chaud, and waited for it to clear a bit. It eventually kind of did, and we did some lovely runs down some powder that hadn’t been ruined yet.

Met Erin and Chris on top of the main lift from Pas, where we stopped for lunch at the lookout cafe. Fabulous food, I had a spinach and goats cheese lasagne, and tarte tatin, and it was so yum. The clouds came and went, and we would get occasional glimpses of the surrounding craggy mountain peaks. The sun was out for the afternoon, which was lovely, and we did some runs down the valley.

Ended the day with some lovely clear speed runs down one of the black runs, very fun.
Headed down at 5pm, another did a last few runs under the lights. It was cloudy and snowing a bit, and weird to be still boarding as it gets dark…Boarding from light to light, with the snow inbetween, pretty invisible.   The lifts usually close at 4pm-5pm, so that you’re well off the mountains before it gets dark.

We ended our boarding week, and headed back to change. Dinner was an interesting mix of all the food left over from our last few dinners, with plenty of vin chaud, cider.
Then it was sleepies.
Woke up the next morning to it snowing, big fat fluffy flakes, my favourite kind. Disappointing, as we were simply cleaning and leaving.

Handing back the key, we quickly trotted out the edge of town, and crossed a little bridge…into France!   The border was right there, along the streambed, so we enjoyed crossing over that a couple of times, in the snow.  It was so lovely and snowey.

 

Walked to the bus stop getting covered in snow, then the bus was half an hour late, possibly cause of the snow. Back to Toulouse.  Got kinda travel sick on teh ride, as it was a super windy mountain road, and the driver seemed to think he knew it very well, and was super speedy, despite the downhill, and the fact that it was snowing. Luckily I had an audio book, so could listen to that, while looking out the window.   As we got lower in altitude, the lovely snow turned to pelting rain, and it was grey and rainy all the way back to Toulouse.

A bit sad to be finished snowboarding, as it means we are finished for the year, it is different when we’re living in the UK to NZ.  NZ we used to go up every couple of weekends, with a South Island trip in there somewhere.   Here in the UK, we just take a week and do it all at once.  I will definitely miss it until next year.