Snowboarding in Austria, Bludenz before the season started

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So a quick background update - whilst I was bringing home the bread and butter and building my shrine of Nadz J - Nadia was gallivanting around Paris and Switzerland, finding toilets with infestations in Paris and making love to a special someone called Charlie (the snow man yar).

On the 13th of December 2008 (not a Friday but a Saturday) I decided to hop on to a plane cause i felt sorry for nadz the loner. She was
dying without me and i felt sorry for the loner munchkin. She was missing me and finding it hard without my tender loving.

So i got on at Schiphol airport for my flight to Vienna. I was flying with skyeurope and Nadia was always on the top of my mind. The flight
was 105euros and I was there within 2 hours - after nearly missing my flight cause i was put in the klm line. When i got to Vienna I caught the s-bahn to meet Clemens. Clemens was the guy hooking us up with keys to our chalet in Tschangla in Bursberg. I met him through couch surfing. I was a bit devo riding through Vienna cause I wouldn't get to see it this time round so I decided to definitely come back. Clemens gave me the keys to our chalet - we were paying 150e for it in total (50e a night). Then i said good bye. On the train i listed to my podcast and napped. Sometime in the morning i got up to get my bags down. Some guys made a comment about me in Russian. I asked them what they meant and i think they were taken aback. They turned out to be from Georgia off on a 4 day train ride with lots of hash to start a new life in Paris.

After talking to them for a little while - in which time they managed to annoy all the passengers around us - it was time for my stop. We
got to Salzburg 1 hour late and it was 4:22am when i got there. I said good bye to the boys and wished them luck. Then i went and sat in the waiting booth. Between then and 6 am i managed to get a bit of shut eye in and go to the toilet (0.50e) and before i knew it was 6am and time to board my train. I got on (i had brought a eurail pass for 229e - 5 countries select in Amsterdam) and had not being paying for trains since. I fell asleep again and started to wake to the amazing scenery around 9am.

By this time I was riding through beautiful picturesque mountains. And there were gorgeous houses covered with snow and cute villages at the cradle of the mountain. I was overly tired but was so stunned by the amazing scenery of it all. At 10:35am - it was about 10 mins late - I arrived at Bludenz. It was surreal getting off into the train in all this snow. I couldn't wait to share it with Nadz. I went to look for
her in the kassa (ticketing office). She was there with another lady and her 15 year old daughter - which turned out to be Clemens cousin
and auntie there to drive us to the Chalet. It was a beautiful view and the Chalet was perfect it was literally on the snow and 10 mins
walk from the chair lift. And we had sledges to our disposal. We had some lunch then got onto some good times with the sledges.

After that we headed to the chairlifts and found out there was no where to hire ski clothes?!? as the shop didn't open until 6 days
time. All we could hire were boards and boots. We were a bit annoyed at first but then this was an awesome resort and really friendly and family like feeling - ie the guy didn't even take a deposit or credit card for our snowboard just our names and a chalet number - which I wasn't even sure of. We came home to our delicious romantic dinner and sexual chocolate in the chalet.

The next day we got up nice and early 15th of December 2008. Sorted our equipment and got up to the top of the mountain cause you just gotta. After a few misfits and hiccups - through which i went through a period of hating snow boarding and nadz stacking it badly and flying backwards down the hill 007 style i thought the only thing that would break her fall was THE cliff - we were going down the mountain awesome styles and having some mould wine or what was it called again Nadia?
Good times. On the way back to the chalet i was greeted by two young scruffians. We had some neighbours wit dogs. I had a good time
roughing them up and dwelling on how awesome our day was and how i would like to spend a whole season at the snow one day. Good times😊

We got up earlier the next day. The blankets were so warm - as we had a second layer (which we snuck from the other room) and it felt
amazing. I was a little stiff but eventually rolled out of bed. We had a nice early start at the mountain - we were out and about at 9:30am.
We covered the majority of brandnertal today. We started at tschengla and caught up the lift at SB Restaurant Einhornstuble and then I
snowboarded and Nadia skied down to Fuchsbau and got the ski lift up to Loischkopf. We realised we were maniacs yesterday cause we went down a black run. So not only did we struggle yesterday cause we hadn't put on our gear for however long - but i had misread the map and got us onto a black run by accident.

The ski runs are a bit different here - it goes black for advanced, red for intermediate and blue for advanced. Though in general - or
maybe its cause I haven't boarded for so long - I felt that the runs were harder than back home. So we did a bit of a victory dance when we got to the top cause we were so proud and the view was killer up here.

Then we got the cable car from Burtschasttel. This was more the Brand side of the mountain I would say and was more suited to our level beginner - intermediate I would say - so we floored it a lot more. We went down run 1 and then caught up the chair lift to SB
Niggenkoptsble. Then we got number 2 and ten number 1 to the 4 person chair lift. We got to the top and then rode the number 5 down. Then we got down to SB Restaurant Herbertus.
Then we caught up the chair lift and went down number 6. We had a pretty good productive day and got a few more runs in. I axed myself a few times - hard where i fell but at high speeds where I just winded
myself. But my technique was improving to some parts where I was just flooring it - Ivan would be so proud. Nadz also improved a fair bit
and had some severe stacks. Her equipment was a bit faulty in that it wasn't fitted to her properly but the guy who rented it to us couldn't
really understand English that well so it was difficult to change it and get it fixed. So we left it. I was so proud that Nadz still kept
going. Back in the Chalet we had another delicious dinner and packed ourselves to leave. Ahh ill miss ye Austria.

We were so saw!!! we had to undress each other plus everything was aching. We had the best workout that day.


Guten Tag. Wie hisbe du? My nama is Dasha und wie gehts? Ik bien gud! So we got up nice and early this morning again at like 7 for some reason I was dreaming about Michael (Pomy) - I discussed this with Nadia and she seemed uninterested. She had never been exposed to that kind of vulgarity. We had watched Superbad the night before and I was quoting the awesome one liners - ps thanks Ivan for putting that on my laptop and thanks Nadia, Courtney, Renee, Emma, Adam, Rachelle, Josephine, Matt, Trevor and Ivan. We packed our stuff and said good bye to the chalet. It was sad to go. But not yet my friends cause we still had another day of boarding to do. Oh yeah and Nadia had skiing. The day before we had been told that it would snow in the morning. But on the balcony there was no snow to be seen!

We walked down with our change of shoes in tow down to the lifts. It was damn foggy. I was starting to get paranoid. I looked at my trusty side kick - she also had a look of unease about her. Perhaps she was thinking of nesting???

We got to the kassa - where we got our tickets from and we kindly asked the nice woman if she could look after our bag with shoes in it.
She agreed.
We asked if it would be really bad on the mountain. She couldn't speak English very well and she said maybe it might be clearer at the top.
We got the chair lift up. It was terrible visibility trying to ski down to the next chair lift. Nadia said she wasn't going to go down.
It reminded me of Liz when i took her down to high noon at thredbo - an intermediate run and she was like I hate you. But actually no wait Nadia didn't say that. But she followed me down like the humble lamb she is. But she was bad ass. Damn that girl was bad ass Then we got the chair lift. We caught the next chair lift up and did a nice lil ride down to the gondola. By the time we got to our favorite blue runs on the other side - runs 1 and 3 FYI - it had cleared up. Me and nadz went skiing down to the chair lift. And nadz floored it! Hard core. I wanted to take photos of her but she beat me to the damn chair lift. I was well impressed. It was romantic catching the chair lift up and maybe if I wasn't so frozen I would have given her a hug. So mentally I gave her a hug. We got off the other side - were Nadia had jumped off the chair lift the day before - and we rode this bad boy a few times. And we floored it. We took the T-bar up a few times and Nadia was damn good. She never fell off once. Then it was time to call it a ay. It was 2pm and we were expecting our taxi to pick us up at 4.30. So we got the gondola back.

On the way back we met the cute liftie operating the gondola again. I think his name was Flavian - well the story was that I meant to ask
him how he was in German but i accidentally ended up asking his name. Then we rode down to the bottom. I axed myself going down cause visibility got way bad and i sorta paused to look around and bam!
axed.
Then we got to the bottom and picked up our shoes.

I told the girl at the kassa that she should go do a bit of riding - i bet it would have been perfect the next day - lots of fluffy powder to
ride on!
Then we returned our equipment - and i managed to talk the girl into giving it to us for the price of 2 days instead of 3 - i told her we
only did half a day on the first day and half a day today. She said we don't normally do this but ok.
Lisa - this lassie dog followed us home - all the way towards the Zimba. Oh how I miss the courtneil. Anyways we packed paid the last
respects to our humble abode of 3 days then we dropped the keys in the letterbox and headed off.
We walked down the street and the taxi ended up being 10 mins late but she was happy we had walked down to meet her. She dropped us off at the bus stop and found out that it was leaving in 15 minutes. WE paid her 14e and then she drove off. The bus came and I noticed 4 guys - 2 were good looking sitting near us. I could understand what they were saying and realised they were Russian. One came up to us and asked if we were from Scotland. I said no I'm from Australia. I asked were they were from - they said Moldova. I asked if they understood Russian and we had a brief chat then they got off. Then we got an amazingly delicious kebab. For 3 euros each in delicious Turkish bread. We were in heaven.
Then it was time to get on the train platform 2b at Bludenz train station. Good bye Bludenz - hello Lindau Hbf. We were at Lindau Hbf
for about 6 minutes before we departed from platform 2 to Friedrichshafen Stadt. From Friedrichshafen Stady - which we departed
at 19:33 we were on our way to Radolfzell. We got there after 50 minutes. It was a 12 minute wait and then we were on our final train
at 20:55 to Offenburg - with a designated arrival time of 23:01.

Ok so I don't really know when we got to the German border but I can tell you that the guy on our train that was also getting off at
Offenburg was hot - he gave us directions on how to get to the bus station at Offenburg Station.

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