I came back from a weeks great skiing in Söll yesterday. We flew from Hurn Bournemouth International Airport, which has several advantages over say Gatwick or Heathrow for me:
- Its closer (45 – 60 mins versus 2 hours)
- Its quieter – no massive queues at check-in or security
- Its smaller – no massive hike to get to the departure gate (its only got 4 gates and they are all next to each other)
- The plane leaves at a sensible time of day – last check-in was 0825, so I didn’t need to get up in the middle of the night.
Finding your way about the ski area in Söll is shall we say interesting. Everywhere else I have skied (Mayrhofen, Tignes, Val d’Isere, Courchevel, Andorra etc) the pistes all have names or numbers and in some resorts the piste markers tell you how far it is to the bottom of the piste. Not so in Söll, there the lifts are numbered and the piste markers tell you which lift(s) the piste you’re on connects to. So you are skiing down a piste and the markers will say 21 23 30 because this piste goes to those 3 lifts. There are two “piste 31″s which come down to lift 31 from opposite directions. It must be a nightmare for the mountain rescue people figuring out which piste an injured skier is.
Oh and some of the red runs on the piste map are actually blue runs.
Despite all that I had a great week’s skiing and I hope to go back there soon (now I understand their piste marking).
