20 Skiing
The Snow Centre, Hemel Hempstead
Enjoyment - 80%
Success - 60%
Will try again - Yes
First timer’s recommendation – Learn the basics at an indoor slope first as it’s a lot cheaper than using a couple of days of your holiday, and a lot less harsh than learning on a dry slope.
I’ve only been skiing once before, to Andorra in 2012 on a trip that was more eventful for what happened off-piste than on it. Kayleigh got her bag and passport stolen in a drive-by mugging, our hire car, which wasn’t designed for the snow, got towed to a road at the top of the resort, froze solid and had to be jump started, and when we returned it the whole front bumper had fallen off. Add to that a case of food poisoning and a trip to the embassy in Barcelona to get a replacement passport, and it was an effort to get in six days on the slopes. Kayleigh is an excellent snowboarder, and I picked up the basics of skiing reasonably well, apart from the whole slowing down and stopping part. I mastered falling over and rolling after a couple of days though.
As I didn’t win the £8,000 on The Chase, I couldn’t afford to go skiing to an actual resort,
so settled on the Snow Centre in Hemel Hempstead, which is apparently Europe’s largest indoor slope, and the closest to London. I managed to do 11 runs in an hour and only fell over twice which wasn’t too bad, and one of them was getting taken out whilst going up the ski lift by a learner who fell off in front of me. There was a mixture of beginners and experts on the slope, but going during a weekday helped as it probably gets pretty busy there at weekends and school holidays.
The video was taken by one of the instructors who followed me down, and I was mainly concentrating on not falling over, hence the cautious start. It was good fun and the slope is a decent size, but by the time you’ve picked up speed you have to slow down and stop or risk crashing through the nets at the bottom. I didn’t ski at all when I was a kid, and it’s something I’d love to do with Ena and baby number two when they’re old enough, and somewhere like The Snow Centre would be perfect to learn on before going somewhere glamorous like the Cairngorms.
