Back to the Bunny Hill

I never would have thought my best memory would come from a day when I awoke before daylight, but here we are.

It was about 06:00 when we set off from the school that day, a total of twenty-four students, if my memory serves. I was in a car, not with strangers, but with people I didn’t know so well. They played music that wasn’t quite my taste, and my breakfast consisted of a sandwich that had been sitting out since the night before. The two hour ride was loud, dark, and cold, but I was so excited.

Finally, we arrived in the daylight at the foot of a mountain. It was crazy how fast the German grass turned to Austrian snow when I wasn’t paying attention along the drive.

Nervous and unsure of myself, I followed my friends to the rental station, got equipped with some skis, and we were off! Up the gondola! Evergreens ever so carefully dusted and piled with snow passed below us as we continued up up up! At the top of the mountain, we ran into the others who went quickly slipping down the slopes.

I struggled putting on my skis, and after a quick lesson from a friend, I panicked and froze at the top of the slope. What was a kid from the desert thinking, trying to ski in the alps? The context of it all was rather comical. I’d only ever seen about two inches of snow until just earlier that month, and I’d never even had the guts to rollerblade down anything steeper than a driveway. What was I doing at the top of a mountain full of fresh powder?

Back to the bunny hill it was.

Patient but antsy for some real skiing, my friend suggested we find some of the others. After another interesting set of events, we found a pair of our friends - one she could go down the run with and one with the same shoe size as me interested in swapping skis for a snowboard - if only for a little while.

Back to the bunny hill once more!

I taught him what little I knew about skis, and he held my hands as I fell on my face trying to stand on the snowboard. But we both thoroughly enjoyed the switch and were even joined by his friend who had split off before. (My ski-teacher friend found someone more on her skill level and whooshed away with her.)

So, there we were, a beginner on skis, a first-timer in the snow, and a second-time snowboarder, carefully maneuvering our young-adult selves around toddlers on the practice hill. But we happily spent the afternoon gliding down that little hill atop an Austrian alp, joking and helping one another with what little we knew. At 15:00 when the “magic-carpet” (conveyor belt) stopped, we took some pictures then rode the gondola back down - joking all the while.

We arrived back at the school just minutes late to dinner - time enough to get some much needed food - then we all warmed up with a shower, went to bed after many tiring hours of wakefulness, and that was that. Our day trip to the Alps.

Many things could have ruined that day - a discouraging start on the skis, losing my voice for two hours at the top, a malfunction of the straps that wouldn’t release my feet from the board, my utter lack of layers against the cold, any number of the hard falls I took when I tried to stop, or the fact that I never built the courage to go down the actual slope.

But remembering that day, that late January Saturday, with fantastic friends and a gorgeous view... Man, I’d love to go back to the bunny hill.

((That’s an actual photo from that day))