Sunday 30 January – Ticket to ride

Current location: Kitzbühel, Austria
11.11pm, Being very proud of myself. Today Andy and I went up the Kitzbüheler Horn mountain and he attempted to teach me to snowboard. I'd been once before, when I visited Austria last Easter but, essentially, it was like beginning again as I'd forgotten everything from the last time. Which is probably a good thing as it's fair to say that the first time I ever went was a bit of a disaster.

Anyway, I went up today full of enthusiasm and excitement, and it was such an amazing day. I didn't seem to fall over that much and I tried everything Andy threw at me without much fear. It was a really sunny day so the snow was nice and soft, so I guess that the threat of falling over wasn't quite so scary.

However, after a few hours, I was tired out and ready to catch the last lift (at 4pm) back up to the Alpenhaus at the top where all our friends were waiting with beers. So it was a shame I wasn't quite as fast as I thought I was getting to the lift... We arrived at 4.02pm and were told, in no uncertain terms, that we had missed the last lift and there was no way to the top. Which meant that we had to snowboard about half an hour down the mountain to the middle station. My enthusiasm waned pretty quickly and I was on the verge of a paddy before I realised that there was literally nothing that could be done; we just had to get to the middle station. I was worn out though and was falling over every minute, so did what any self-respecting non-snowboarder would do. I unstrapped myself from the board, sat on it and tobogganed all the way. It was so much fun that, by the time we reached the bottom, I was super glad that the lift station men were such jobsworths.

When we were safely back on dry ground at the bottom, I felt we'd earned some apres-ski time, so we all met at one of the town's pubs, The Londoner, where I told everyone how awesome I was at snowboarding, as you can imagine. A few hours later and Andy and I headed home for dinner and Trivial Pursuit. And I found a new way of getting down the hills on our walk home: tobogganing on the snowboard of course.