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Selecting a hotel is relatively easy. You ask your friends
and find out that no one has ever visited stubaital. The travel bureau
sends you brochures for 50 hotels in twelve languages, none of them
English. Web information is equally overwhelming. Email from a guy
who was a trip captain a few years back assumes that I was a five year
resident of Stubaital, and that everyone won't mind riding a bus for an hour to
the slopes. I was unable to decipher the names of the towns from the
hotels or the phone numbers from the street addresses. Eventually I found an old
moth eaten folder in the ski club archives from a trip taken during the War
between the States. The crumbling brochure yielded a faded name, Almhof.
Madonna! 'WWW.ALMHOLF.IT' yielded a web
page. Return email informed me that I had the wrong Almhof hotel. I
want
dot COM, not dot IT. Bill Gate's program, however, has stored dot IT in its
innards and every third or so email goes to the wrong hotel. The
wrong hotel gets mad and threatens me with my own private avalanche if I venture within fifty kilometers of their hotel. Eventually,
I get prices for the rooms, the lift tickets and
the ski school. I'm on easy street now!
Let's have a look at the place.
The Hotel was very
beautiful. It could not have been more authentically
Austrian. Everything was carved wood...real wood, pine from the
local forests. |
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The view from hotel was, in itself, worth the
trip. You can see the mountains eleven miles away and the
glacier. It's under the white part which is called snow. |
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It was a Four Star hotel with great
food and great amenities. Dinner to the right and Breakfast to
the left.
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Every hotel needs beds. Here's ours. Here's
Carol. Here's negative enthusiasm.
Interesting what one day on the slopes and one night in the après'
ski bar can do for your energy level. |
 Ah,
the hot
tub. A wonderful way to relax away the ski aches of the day.
Behind me are the saunas and the showers. Pictured are
Carol, Pam and her daughter, Kristin. Study this picture and you will see
that the couple in the upper left are only wearing towels. So were
the other fifteen people out of the picture to the right.
I don't know where my brains were. I know that people in Europe go
naked in the sauna and in the hot tub. In fact, the inhabitants of
the
sauna made my friend, Steve, remove his trunks. They were offended.
He couldn't handle it and left...so would have I. I think that the
only reason that I got this picture is because my digital camera does
not look like a camera and I was so quick getting it out and snapping
the picture that no one had time to wring my neck.
Later, when
I had gotten in the tub, a girl came out of the sauna.
Totally naked! I nearly inhaled the tub dry. Then two guys
came out. BIG guys! Pam wouldn't let Kristin turn around and
I had to splash water on Carol to get the glazed look out of her
eyes.
We never went back. My heart couldn't take the girls, my ego
couldn't take the guys and Carol couldn't take divorce.
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