Our second full day in Verbier began with a trip back to the SureFoot guys. My right boot needed some adjustment (and indeed, I made a second trip later that day) but once completed, they were perfect.

As with the day before, the weather was absolutely flawless. Saturday also marked the first day of the full-on winter 2010-2011 season, so the mountain really opened up. The snow was great, the lines were small, and it was so warm that I skied with my jacket unzipped most of the time. Of course, in such bright sun, a bit of “racoonism” was inevitable, as ably demonstrated by Stephanie.

At the end of the day, with Steph worn out, I suggested one last ride up the lift before we called it a day. She suggested that I go instead and ride as aggressively as I wanted to, which I did. Before heading down, however, I took a photo of the view from the peak.

Following a valley run, in which Steph Рmostly Рtook the long winding blues, meeting up with me at the bottom of some more aggressive reds, we watched an old Bond flick, then went to dinner at La Pinte. Apparently under new management this year, we happened across them during their grand opening. We had a cheese fondue with tomatoes over potatoes, followed by a Cr̩me Catalone (sort of a Spanish Cr̩me Brulee), along with a local wine. Again I was surprised by the fair price Рjust a rappen over 80 Stutz for the two of us. So much for being a rich-folks-only town.

The train home on Sunday was mercifully quick, weighing in at just 3 hours 39 minutes. But I miss it already….

This weekend just past saw Steph and I in Verbier to buy a pair of custom ski boots for me enjoy a romantic weekend away. We found a great deal on a hotel (more on that later) and enjoyed some fabulous pistes.

For those not in the know, Verbier is located in the French side of Switzerland, though it’s also rather close to Italy. It’s a very posh little town accessible via a winding mountain road, or via gondola, from it’s rather poorer cousin Le Châble. Unfortunately, since things on the French side never work as smoothly as they do on the German side, our train was 7 minutes late to Lausanne and we missed the train to Martigny by two minutes, meaning the trip took a whopping 6.5 hours (rather than just over 4 as planned). Following that, we managed to get stuck in the last train – our door didn’t work, the girl in front of us moved to the next, we followed, she slipped out before they shut… and the train door locked as it pulled into it’s overnight parking spot 100 meters away. While a night locked in a train alone with a beautiful woman isn’t the worst thing in the world, the conductor found us during his final inspection and let us out, at which point we’d missed the last bus up and had to grab a cab.
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The last leg of the trip was on the St. Bernard Express, which included this cute little map on the table at each seat.

The resort was gorgeous, and a plethora of shops awaited to take our money. Surprisingly, we found the prices to be very competitive – I got a pimp new hat for 60 bucks, and Steph got a cute little helmet for 120. The hotel, while a bit on the noisy side, rang in at just 340 bucks for 3 nights, and lift tickets were maybe 60. The biggest cash outlay, of course, were the SureFoot custom-made ski boots that, while completely incidental to the purpose of the trip, just happened to be the first thing I looked at Friday morning. While I’m not overly keen on the look of the boots, they’re alright, and the fit is unbelievable. My skiing improved 10-fold over the old Head boots I was wearing before. If you’re doing a lot of skiing, look into them – they run 3-4 times the price of off-the-shelf boots, but they’re well-worth it.

The slopes themselves were great, though the people in that region are completely incompetent at marking pistes. Red bars would, halfway down a slope, be replaced with either blue or black. Super-steep very long pistes full of bumps would be marked as red, while a mildly steep 20 meter piste somehow received a black designation. Even better, one slope changed from a red to a blue between Friday and Saturday.

While I did some of my own skiing, I mostly stuck with Steph, helping her to improve her skiing. By the end of the day, she’d even done her first black piste, though I imagine it will be a season before she does another!