Recollections
It all started at 5:00am one Sunday morning. Five intrepid hashers met at Stansted Airport for their trip to Pas de la Casa in the Andorran mountains. It was a long journey with a 3 hour coach trip from Toulouse airport in France to Andorra. But we arrived in time for Sunday happy hour.
Happy hour occurred every day between 5 and 7. Yes that's two happy hours! During this time you had to drink as much as possible because the beer was half price. We were buying 5 pints of Kronenburg for 10 euros (7 pounds)! We then went to dinner at about 7:30 and if we had any energy left went down to a local bar or hotel bar after dinner.
Pas de la Casa had very active après ski with bars and clubs open until the early hours. Our collection of friends grew as the week went by as you can see in the last photo. Two nights to remember were the pub crawl on Monday and the Hypnotist on Saturday. Crushy and Breezeblock looked remarkably well on the Tuesday morning.
The skiing was great. When we arrived we found out that the snow depths were the lowest for 27 years! There was only a foot of snow. The pistes were still remarkably good and you could still travel 150K out of the 200K of pistes. Crushy and I decided to do ski school in the afternoons. We somehow managed to get into group 1, that's level 3 for those who know what level 3 means. I don't! That was good fun and we met up with other pupils which further extended the après ski group.
On Wednesday night it snowed. It really dumped it down. We had a good foot of brand new powder to play in on Thursday morning. That was amazing. I've been skiing for 10 years and you don't get it much better. Needless to say new techniques had to be mastered. But we all coped very well. There was one particular run which was a bit of a roller coaster. I can remember the laughter as Crushy was seen tumbling like a red ball in a cloud of white powder. He flew down this run like the day before but this time he dug his skies into a big drift of fresh snow which catapulted him along the ground at 30mph. Hilarious
Talking of accidents, poor Evan didn't make the powder day as he broke his wrist the day before. But he did get a free ride in a skidoo!
We would all recommend going to the Grand Valira ski resort in Andorra. It has a very large ski area and is very good value for money.