Week 12: White Christmas

worlds away from home.

what

To say I was nervous about driving the van into the alps was an understatement. I’ve driven at the snow before, put on chains and felt the white knuckle fear of loosing a little traction when driving on ice, but that was Australia. For some reason I was extra fearful of the Dolomites even though realistically the roads are so much better prepared for snow and ice than at home, with the locals keeping the roads clear and open most of the year. I was so fearful that I even got onto google maps street view to check out hairpins and switch backs to see which was the easiest way into the village!

We left the safe harbour that was Bolzano and headed for a truck stop that we could do our final steps to ‘winterize’ the van for the week. Corvara was expecting temperature low’s of -11 C and we needed to make sure the van was ready. We drained it of its water, took all things liquid and put them in the fridge to stop them from freezing, we had already filled it with alpine diesel and topped off the windscreen-wipers with -20 washer fluid (which is really just alcohol and detergent). Satisfied that we had done everything we possibly could, we headed into the mountain. Relief does not even begin to describe how I felt when we arrived in Corvara. And with only one minor hitch! The roads were easy and well maintained, we didn’t need chains and there was no ice. I did however stupidly pull into a shoulder to allow the large line of cars and transport vans to pass that had banked up through the winding roads. When the coast was finally clear, the back wheels couldn’t gain any traction. My heart dropped into my stomach, this had happened to me before at Thredbo so I knew it wasn’t fatal but it wasn’t good either. After some very slow reversing, rolling forward, loosing traction and repeat, I finally got one wheel onto the asphalt and off we went. Pat was so calm and relaxed the whole time (on the outside: internally, he was freaking there hell out) realising that I was panicking on the inside, and so when we finally got on the road again all he had to say was ‘ah well, now we know, lesson learned’.

Arriving way too early to check in, the family who ran the lodge rushed to ready our room so we could start bringing stuff in. We felt that they thought we were moving in permanently with the amount of stuff we were hauling. As the week progressed we quickly realised that we had brought in a fraction of what most of the snow bunnies were carrying in their brand leather luggage neatly loaded into their hundred thousand euro SUV’s. By the time we hired our gear, got our ski passes, grabbed lunch and settled into our room it was almost dark, we walked into the village and did all our van laundry in most efficient washer dryer laundromat we had com across before an early night in preparation for skiing.

I go skiing every year. I love it, I have travelled just to do it, when I was 18 I spent time in Austria skiing in Tyrol with friends and have been lucky enough to ski in America and Canada. Pat skates, he has snowboarded before, but not for 8 years and understandably was very apprehensive as we headed up our first gondola. Half an hour in, it was clear that he was totally capable of snowboarding even on steep and more complex runs so off we went! We were blessed with blue bird days, 10 km of visibility (is that even possible?!) and no wind. Topping off this perfection was the surprising lack of people. We learnt later in the week that ‘peak’ really starts closer to New Years with only a few foreign travellers and locals on the mountain over Christmas. That meant the whole area had no lines and kilometres upon kilometres of empty runs. By the third day, Pat’s confidence was up so we split up for the morning so he could play in the terrain park while I opted to complete the clockwise Sella Ronda with a few accidental ‘alternativo’ routes along the way. Our last day we took it a little easier, both a little sore from the day before and Pat was nursing a very bruised bottom from a stack in the park.

A note on being away from home at christmas:

Christmas came during these days in Corvara but did not seem or feel like Christmas to us. Early Christmas morning we both Face-Timed our families, my entire extended family, adorned with their Christmas cracker hats, were at my Aunty and Uncle’s place drinking white wine in the sun. We could see the haze from the ongoing bushfire but it looked warm and familiar none the less. New additions to the family were laying on their little bellies on picnic rugs while parents, grandparents, and great grandparents beamed down at them with love. I was (or the phone was) passed around for me to say hello to everyone. I cried as soon as they hung up. I am super close with my family, not just my parents and sister but whole extended family. Being away at Christmas was really hard for me and even though we we’re having this amazing time and conditions could not be more perfect, my heart ached all day not being able to sit around and talk absolute shit with them. We did have an expensive ‘Christmas dinner’ which was delicious and traditional but it somehow couldn’t match the frantic peeling of prawns with my cousin AJ or having that first slice of Christmas pudding, my great grandmothers recipe, soaked in brandy and lit on fire by my uncle Eddy, I don’t think anything ever will.

Leaving Corvara was also a little sad. We had become very familiar with the family that owns and runs the lodge. We had both come to the conclusion that we would come back and when we do we are definitely staying at La Scalira again. We loaded the van back up with all our things and we were ready to see if she would start. After weeks of reading blogs and stressing about leaving the van in minus temperatures for a week, I knew every possible thing that could go wrong; the diesel could coagulate and block the filter, snow could melt into the locks/wipers/handbrake and freeze them stiff, the biggest of all being that under those temperatures, the battery wouldn’t be able to start the engine OR the leisure battery would pack it in. So in went the key, the engine turned over without skipping a beat and all was right with the world once again. We had booked dinner in Tuscany for New Years eve so decided to try and get as far as we could. We made it to the freezing town of Bologna and gave it a day before passing through the mountains that partition Tuscany from Emilia - Romagna once again, this time ending up in Pistoia, taking us back above freezing and back into the blue skies.