Wednesday, June 10th - Sandra and I woke up to some insistent banging on our door. I tried to ignore it but whomever was there was being quite persistent. I opened it up and it was Kristen telling us that the top of the mountain was closed! Our lodge was only about halfway up the mountain and we had all bought passes to go up to the top to play in the snow but apparently the weather was turning quite quickly and the winds were too strong for the cable cars. I was really disappointed, I was really looking forward to some tubing and tobogganing. Sian also told us that we only had a few hours to go down to the base of the mountain before the cable cars would be closed in that direction as well.
I woke up Sukhey and Jas to let them know about the situation and we decided that we should head down to Engelberg to grab some lunch and other supplies. Rochelle, Lorraine, Sukhey, Jas, Sandra and I headed down on the cable car. We wandered around for a bit - in the opposite direction of Engelberg - opps! After finally finding our way into town we ran into Jake, Paula and Chloe at a Bistro that they said was pretty good so we decided to stop and have some lunch. The food was quite yummy - really good pizza. We had heard that some stores in Engelberg have their own siesta so we decided to go to the only grocer in town to pick up some fruit and booze while we waited for our food. In the end we had heard wrong but at least we picked up our "supplies". After lunch the rest of the girls hit up the grocer and then it was time to catch the cable car back up to the lodge. Before we did we all goofed around in the gift shop at the base of the mountain - trying on funny hats and generally making asses of ourselves - lots of silly fun.
We got back to the lodge and found a bunch of people putting together puzzles - yes puzzles. This is what you do when you're stuck in ski lodge halfway up a mountain. I think it was a race with boys against girls, I watched for a bit but obviously puzzle building isn't the most griping thing to watch. In the end neither teams got very far but apparently they each wasted a good couple hours before quitting!
Rochelle, Sukhey, Jas and I decided to venture outside to find some snow - we could see some small snow piles from our windows, this was especially exciting for Rochelle being from Aussie land. I was pretty excited myself since we barely got any snow in Ontario this past winter - it was definitely closer to a Vancouver winter than an Ontario winter. After climbing a huge hill to a tiny patch of gross, dirty snow we then saw a heap of snow that we decided to check out. We made our way down and found a snow heap that had been made into a number of rooms and passages. We all took turns standing in the snow and taking pictures. Someone then spotted a waterfall not too far off so we decided to check it out - we had to skirt some barbwire and hop over a few small streams but we got there and it was awesome. We climbed up the rocks to the mountain and it was pretty cool, the water was super cold but really clean. I could have drank from it.
Afterward we decided to watch a movie in the movie room and we had a few drinks and then headed for dinner. Dinner was exactly the same at the day before but this time I was starving and I wasn't disappointed. I should mention that poor Sandra was quite sick by now - she had been fighting it since Corfu and by now she wasn't even able to hold food down. Sandra definitely was hit the hardest by the 'contiki sickness." She had ended up missing out on quite a few nights - such as the Vienna nights, trying to get healthy. She was pretty much on a bread diet by now, poor girl.
After dinner Sian had organized Trivia night. I'm a huge fan of trivia night so I was quite excited for it. Also we were stuck halfway up a mountain - there really was nothing else to do besides drink and play games. The night was fun - we played 4 rounds and in the end my team of Sukhey, Jas, Rochelle and I came 4th. The winners were the team with the kiwi's and Ivan, the oldest bunch of the group! After trivia we all headed to the common room trying to figure out something to do. In the end most of the group continued with their own trivia game but I ended up just sitting and talking with Ben on the sidelines. Eventually we were the last two up and I convinced Ben to come outside with me to see just how windy it actually was. (Honestly, really how windy could it be?) We jumped out the window onto the deck and we could barely walk 2 steps - I can honestly say I've never been in winds like that before, I really could have been blown off the side of the mountain. We quickly retreated back inside and it was finally time to head to bed.
*I'm still waiting for pics from Swiss Alps. I'll update once I have them (c'mon Rochelle and Sukhey!)
No comments:
Post a Comment