As Christmas approached, I figured I should end the year in style and spend the last days of the year abroad. I could have lazily spend them at home, but hey, what’s better than looking at the weather predictions, finding out there’s going to be a whole pile of snow coming in the Alps and booking a last-minute ticket to Milano. At first, it looked like I would be able to talk a few friends of mine into joining, but the ended up going nowhere, so on the 28th of December, having slept for only 3 hours after a nice party in my hometown Utrecht, I woke up at 6 and took a 9am flight to Italy.
For those of you following me, last year, we bought a little place in the Northern parts of Italy, close to the French and Swiss borders. We did lots of renovations in the last 8 to 10 months, such as installing electricity, water a bathroom and giving the entire ground floor a paint job. This means I didn’t have to arrange place to stay and only had to book a flight and rent a car.
There’s one slight little issue with the house though. The last 2.2 kilometres (1.4 miles) of the road to the house are not publicly accessible but owned by a consortium instead. This has two major consequences and one minor one. The minor one is that the road is not maintained as well as a public road. This is not much of an issue. Granted, the road gets a little bumpy in places, but nothing your average little Fiat 500 rental car won’t survive. The first major consequence is that the road is not cleared of snow. This is a problem of course.
The house is situated at 1150 meters above sea-level and it’s obviously not unlikely that there’s snow at such an altitude. Problem number two is that there’s no communal water system and that the privately owned water system is shut down in winter times to not allow it to freeze up. In other words: getting to the house by car is (if there’s snow) not an option (unless I’d have a big Range Rover or anything similar, which I don’t) and second, once at the house (by foot or in the best-case scenario by car), there’s no water.
Fortunately, I had anticipated the second problem. The last time I was there (in September) I hauled about 50 liters of water to the house (mineral water that is), so any cooking- and washing-wise I’d be okay. One of the basements is below the ground so the water would not freeze up (I hoped). The first problem (the road) is obviously a bit more fundamental, so I figured, let’s reserve a hotel for the first night and see what happens.
I arrived on the 28th and immediately drove up to the house (or at least, I tried to). The snow was worse than expected (good for skiing though) and the private road was indeed not accessible, even not with snow chains. So I walked up to see how far that would get me. All together it took me about 30 minutes of plowing through half a meter snow. The electricity worked, the heating system (electricity-based) also worked, so that meant that if I was willing to walk half an hour up and down every day, I’d be okay.
I decided to make it an easy first day and take the hotel owners up on the reservation that I made. The remaining days I did stay at the house. An impression of what went on during those few days:
Heating-wise, I didn’t manage to get the living room warmer than 15˚C with all three heaters turned on. During the night, I only had one of the heaters turned on (the one that doesn’t make a lot of sound) which resulted in a temperature in the early morning of 7˚C. While out for New Year’s (I stayed at a friend’s place in a different valley that day) I turned off all the heaters and when I came back it was 2˚C in the house. The kitchen was left unheated and it didn’t get above freezing there (neither below I think).
Water-wise, I could only flush the toilet by taking a bucket of water from a spring 200 hundred meters up the hill. Now this is already a lot better than last year, when we had no toilet at all, but when you have been living in luxurious hotels the six weeks before that with room service, a freshly made bed and bathrobes, this is obviously a big difference. Also, I couldn’t take a shower, but that’s where the pool came in. Nope, there’s no pool in the backyard… There’s a pool on the way to the skiing resort including a Russian bath and all that… So that’s where I had my evening routine every day: first swimming, then a session in the Russian bath and after having showered, back home. Also, I learnt that melting snow to survive does not help you a lot. It’s a lot of work for a very tiny bit of water. I can definitely understand now that surviving in an ice age is pretty much impossible…
Exercise-wise, I had to walk up the hill for about 30 to 40 minutes (depending on how many groceries I brought) every evening and 20 minutes (taking shortcuts by walking straight down instead of following the hairpins in the road) down every morning. In addition to that, I skied for the first three days and for the second three days I took some snowboarding lessons. I had never boarded before and all my kiteboarding friends called me a loser when I told them I only skied. So I also took the occasional beating while learning to go down a hill dude-wise…
Last but not least, I celebrated New Year’s in Valle d’Ayas. Normally, driving up to Valle d’Ayas (and specifically the place friends of our own there) takes a lot of time (Valle d’Ayas is really long), but this time I could take a shorter route, which was quite cool. By taking up the ski lift and skiing down, it only took me 45 minutes to get to Champoluc instead of the normal 2 hours. Unfortunately I had to wait for the Navetta (the shuttle bus that takes you from various places to the skiing resort and back) and this took another 45 minutes. But well, skiing there is obviously way cooler than driving there (hiking might even be a little bit more cool, but I’ll leave that to coming summer or so).
I took plenty of pictures, some of which you’ll be able to find in this blog post. Others can be found in the web album for this trip.
p.s. when I look at these pictures, I realize I really should clean my camera, there are dust honkers all over the place 
) and tasted the herring. This was not as good as the original Dutch herring, but then again, we were at the other side of the globe, eating this Dutch delicacy, with freshly sliced onions. (more pictures on Picasa).
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