Kaprun

So, last weekend I tried to go to Austria for an extended skiing weekend (Thursday to Sunday). 'Tried', I say, because the weather was so bad that the trains were cancelled, and so we ended up catching a black cab to Stanstead. Instead of taking 40 minutes, it took 4 hours and £150 to get from the City to the airport, meaning that almost all of us missed our flight.

I should probably explain, briefly, that I was travelling with 42 people - let's call them 'friends'.

Although 6 people had made the flight (surprisingly, all of them a more exalted type of friend than the rest of us), 36 of us hadn't. A very kind individual, whose generosity will remain anonymous, said that he and his partners would pay for us all to get flights the following day (Friday), and that they would pay for our hotel accommodation.

Given that we were not the only unlucky people to have suffered missed or cancelled flights, it is not surprising that the hotels were completely booked out. Travelling another 4 hours back into London when we had to catch 6:30 am flights was not an option, and so one of my friends offered to let us sleep on the floor of his family home, a farmhouse (actual farmhouse not pictured) -- but only after sampling the delights of his local, the Green Man.

Some people would question the sagacity of inviting 36 friends back to the sanctity of the paternal home. But to invite 36 friends home straight from a lock-in at the pub is verging on demented.

Although it would make for very entertaining reading to describe what happened when we arrived at Ed's house at 3:30 am, I will skip ahead.

Some of us landed in Munich, which is in a different country altogether from our ski resort. Others landed in Linz, which was not really where they were supposed to land. Others made it to Salzburg (much better). I was among those who landed in Munich, where someone was meant to be waiting for us with a car, but as it happens, no one was waiting, and so we caught a EUR 350 taxi to Kaprun, in Austria.

Arriving in Kaprun was depressing. It was raining, and there was no snow on the ground. The only thing I knew about Kaprun in advance of our arrival was that 150 had burned to death in a horrible accident involving the funicular train in a tunnel going up the mountain to the slopes. But we took consolation in Austrian pils, and what I must admit was surprisingly good Austrian food.

From this point, the weekend improved markedly (and so becomes rather boring to narrate).

The following morning (Saturday), we went skiing - something I had not tried in 13 years. What I hadn't quite realised as we drove through the rain-sodden streets of Kaprun the night before is that, to get to the ski slopes, one ascends to a height of some nine thousand feet onto a glacier, and so there was plenty of snow.

That night, while we were all embarrassing ourselves in front of the locals by dressing as characters from "The Sound of Music" (I think I'm the only man who didn't dress as a nun), it snowed.

The trip back was painful, and I've been running a sleep deficit every since we returned.