Subject: Andorra Trip Report Date: Tue, 03 Mar 1998 22:43:19 -0800 From: Seamus Keane To: Ciaran O'Brien , Edith Cormican , Bryan Raleigh , Mark Purcell , Owen Mulcair , Orla Keane , Kieran Keane , Declan O'Keeffe , Micheal Cunney Well as promised and only a few days late here is the trip report on what happened on the inaugural (un-official) club Skiing trip to Andorra. I'll be in Dublin Wednesday night, if theres any action let me know at 087 232 0837. The group which headed out were Donagh Lang, one time club captain, holder of the order of the cricket bat (un-inserted) and previous holder of the title of Morality officer of the club (Oh how the mighty have fallen with the passing of time). There was Edith, former meets sec with a nifty line in tight tops (80% cotton 20% tart), and the love heart top was packed for Valentines night. Derval, our woman in Leixlip was off the leash for the week but had brought her brother Garvin, the Dublin home-boy of the slopes, as a chaperone? The group was rounded out by Julie, a Scots woman who lost her way and found herself in Nenagh with P&G and with Seamus Keane your story teller for the night. Garvin and Julie had skied before but the rest of us were 'snow virgins' so to speak. Sunday We all gathered in Dublin airport at the not unreasonable time of 8:30 on Sunday 8th of Feb. for our week in the Pyrenees. Julie was under orders not to mention the 5-Nations performance by either her nation our ours from the day before. The trips first set back came quickly when we realized we would have to travel with Flying Bus Airlines, aka Ryanair, to Toulouse (huh, huh, he said loose), but despite the strike and having to run a gauntlet of duty free sellers who would put the Jehovah's Witnesses to shame when is comes to persistence we made it to France. Edith was to be our designated 'Mammy' for the trip as the person who had organized it. So she was let deal with the Crystal tour rep. This was a mistake, as she advised the rep we were stating at the Hotel Sabina, which we subsequently learned doesn't exist. We eventually got the right bus and were soon switch backing into the Pyrenees. Beautiful views of snow-covered mountains, impressive rock faces (routes, routes!) and quaint French customs officials at the border pass a trifling 2500m up in the mountains. On the bus journey we learned some things about Andorra, it is the worlds largest duty-free shop having no duty on booze, fags etc. It has a population of 60,000 but only 5,000 are Andorran the rest are avoiding various Tax-men (though we found a lot of Irish, English, Scots, Aussies, and Kiwis avoiding having careers or doing real work by doing a Cian Duggan on it). And quite importantly there is only one bit of flat land in the whole country and that is kept in a Museum. All this shortened the four and a half hour journey to Arinsal (1550m), our home for the week. Arinsal was a small village, but has become a serious skiing resort for the package tour set. The ski runs are down the side of Pic Negre, a 2500m mountain above the resort. By normal skiing standards its actually quite small with few enough runs but it is prety good for a beginner who will be there for just a week. Our base was the Hotel Janet a three star joint which would take about 30-40 if you push it but was quiet with only about 25 when we were there. The rooms were handed out - single men in one, single women in the other and the Dillon family in the last one. Dinner followed. With accommodation and food sorted we went in search of the other 2 of the 4 requirements for life - drink and nookie. We quickly learned that in a country which has no flat land everything is either up-hill or down-hill, and sure enough the pubs were 10 minutes up-hill. All week we found that some one was adding a bit more to the walk every night. Oddly enough you didn't notice the trip home at 3am. On the advice of a friend of Donagh's we hit the Surf bar where the Panorama tour company neglected their own clients and instead loaded us with vast quantities of free Sangria. Suitably inebriated we began to formulate the ground rules for the week, i.e. the three women had to keep at least 15m from the 3 men at night so as not to cramp each others style. The lads made an early attempt to gain the lead over the women by moving in on two ladies across the dance floor. But with true style they fell and spilled drink on three women from Galway. We tried for the consolation prize and a fruitless night was spent trying to chat up any of them, but the lovely Patricia in particular. Around about 2 am we gave up and headed for home. Monday Monday began early with hangovers and an exhilarating chair lift ride up to the bottom of the ski slopes at 1900m. The first hour or two were spent getting kitted out with skis, boots and poles. As we had two hours to kill until the first lesson and as we hadn't figured out how to get the skis on we settled for posing on the terraces for the morning. Eventually we got into our skiing group. There were 30 hopeful students, about 25 of whom were Irish, and Andy from Oz with Jakob from Denmark as our instructors. Our group was fortunate to include 13 Doctors who had studied at UCG (we had need of their services later in the week), but we were unfortunate to have Dave, hands down winner of the 'Tit Of The Week Award'. This asshole was stricken with a very bad case of verbal diarrhoea and laboured under the gross illusion that he was funny. Anyhow we were soon trying on 1 ski and after walking around that way for a while we were let try 2 on at once. This rate of progress proved too much for some and Seamus tried to demonstrate his mastery of the sport by skiing backwards down the nursery slope while wind milling both arms. Miraculously he didn't fall off though the same can't be said for the trail of beginners he creamed on the way to stopping. By the end of the first day there were 3 catagories of people in the group. 1- Those who could go in a straight line and stop, 2- Those who could go in a straight line and stop and turn and 3- Louise. Louise had mastered, well grasped anyway, straight and turning but hadn't an idea about stopping. Typically she would go down the nursery slope turning from left to right and looking like she knew what she was doing. About 10 metres from the fence at the end it would become apparent that she had a problem. 5 metres out she would give up and would parallel her skis (thus allowing her speed to increase rapidly), she would jetison her poles to either side and crash magnificantly into the fence. This performance was repeated every time and brought despair to the guy who's job it was to fix the fence. After a full days falling over and running into people we made for home about 5pm. As a general ice-breaker all the tour companies had organised a pub crawl around the resort. 5 pubs with a schnapps shot in each and free into the Surf night-club afterwards. The pubs all became a blur and could only be remembered by their schnapps, there was peach schnapps, apple schnapps, late schanpps (no booze until we were leaving) and last schanpps. During the night we got to know Rachel and Alison who were staying in the same hotel. Seamus then got into a fight with Alison which had to do with their jobs and the differences between Engineers and Marketing people. On the way home Seamus started to cartwheel and Derval followed. This became a regular occurance for the week until 'it all ended in tears!' The only other incident happened late that night or early Tuesday morning depending on your perspective, when Garvin decided to redecorate his room in some delicate yellow and reddish brown shades, something Derval did not appreciate. Tuesday The instructors at this stage decided to split the group into what our friend Dave described as the 'Fast' class and the 'Remedial' class. Guess where he ended up. With all 4 of our heroes in the Fast class and Dave in the other we finally got some peace and quiet. Later that day Jakob (our tall tanned 23 year old Danish instructor who had the women hanging on his every word, and they probably would have hung from other things if offered the chance) let us loose on the main slopes where we demonstrated our mastery of the skiing techniques of falling over, running into people and walking back up the slope to find our skis. That night was quiet as everyone recovered from the previous nights exertions and only Seamus and Donagh headed out to continue their fruitless search for Patricia. Round about now though we got to know John (the exact day escapes me due to alcohol induced amnesia). John (a Londoner, one time car thief but currently a Dealer (a classier sort of thief)) was mainly in Andorra for Tax reasons and was quite generous with his off-shore funds, bankrolling a large proportion of our drink for the week. He is currently on a world tour and we are trying to get the itinerary so as to follow him (and his generosity) around. Wednesday Wednesday began with the devastating news. Dave had broken his thumb the previous evening when he had tried to stop a slide by putting his hand out as a brake. "It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" spoke Donagh. His group of Doctor friends had diagnosed it as a sprain, but an x-ray in the medical centre also revealed a lot about the standards of teaching in the UCG medical school. By now our group was capable of heading all the way up the mountain on our own and skiing down on the Blue slopes. The slopes are colur coded - Green (piss easy) Blue (bruised) Red (bloody) and Black (dead) That night we were not fed in the Hotel but had to fend for ourselves. So up to the Italian we headed. Lots of Pizza and Pasta were consumed together with wine a plenty. The Irish waitress was unable to meet requests for Lyons tea (are we the only people in the world who don't fix a string to our tea bags? And how come no matter how much you stirr it Lipton tea never gets any stronger?) It also was England v Chile night. Our first stop was the Quo Vadis bar which had a distinctly Saxon feel to it. We moved to the Surf again where there was a satisfying cheer every time Chile scored with a big one when they won. Some time was spent explaining to John the etiquette fo