Skiing at Lenggries

Published on 2006-1-21 by Michael Stanton

Lenggries skiing, January 21, 2006

Kris was out of town this weekend on a ski lesson. I couldn't let her have all the fun, so thanks to a very nice babysitter for the boys I was able to hop on the train to the Lenggries ski area. It was my first time to go to an official ski area in Germany, and I learned a fair bit. First off, I was ecstatic about the price and convenience. At the train station I purchased a combination train-and-ski-lift ticket for 33 Euros (like 38 dollars now?). It covered the hour long train journey there and back, and also my lift ticket for the whole day. That was a pretty darn good deal I thought. I read "All the President's Men" on the train, nearing the exciting end. What a tedious but instructive story.

In Lenggries, I hopped on a bus for 10 minutes to reach the Brauneck cabin lift. It was neat to see mountains again after two weeks. At the top, I started skiing, pretty delighted by conditions and my not-completely-forgotten small reserve of skill. I had watched a video the night before by a ski expert named Lito Tejada-Flores, and it really paid off. I explored different lifts, having to get used to the German-style rope tow which is strange but good. I conversed in broken German with a twenty-something guy who worried where the United States was heading politically. This is a standard conversation!

Anyway, the skiing was really fun, although the moguls were pretty severe on steeper slopes because it hasn't snowed in several (gorgeous) days. The upper mountain was in a thick cloud, but at the middle level I saw pretty blue and white surrounding peaks. These are the Bavarian Pre-Alps, so they were mostly forested, with little limestone outcrops. I skied for about 3 hours then headed for home. I met some Americans on the bus who knew about our Avid.com office near Boston. Crazy. They were in town for 2 days, and were amazed how easy it was to suddenly decide to go skiing. Of course they were wearing slacks and had leather driving gloves, not having planned for it.