J2Ski Holiday 2014

we all had a great time and we all got on ...you are right Tony we were lucky ....there was really tooo much snow and the fact the a lot of the runs are in the trees helped...I would certainly return ...like Val de Fassa The area is great value and you don't feel that your leg is being lifted..an odd tip for anyone driving there ...a lot of the self service garages don't accept standard debit/credit cards only cash....it took me 3/4 stops before I found one

I am not home yet. I'm currently in London, hoping to go home today, but the floods here seem to have disrupted the trains.
I had a great holiday :)
Thanks everyone for coming with me :)
And Tony, it wasn't luck, I spent ages organizing all that snow ;)

I will write a long report on it when I get home. I reckon it's a great resort :)

I liked it too ...excellent in the conditions we encountered ..(trees) and very scenic....and Ally did a great job

Sinbad14 gave me lots of photos. Here are 2 of them:

This is the village of lower Folgarida, where we were staying. This is where we started and finished each ski-ing day. The hotel mini-bus brought us here, to the gondola, each morning beginning the free shuttle service at 8-30 a.m. and then brought us back between 4-5 p.m. The hotel was about a 5 minute walk from the gondola and the lift was much appreciated :)

In this area were the ski hire shops, ATM, ski pass office, general store, pizza restaurant, souvenir shop, medical centre, pharmacy etc.



One thing I particularly liked about the ski area is that it has virtually no drag lifts. The only one I went on all week was a very short poma lift that just serviced the slalom course.
There were some old 2 and 3 man chair lifts, but there were also a lot of modern chair lifts with 'bubble' windscreens to keep the cold, wind, and snow out when we were sitting in them. Plus, there were several gondolas in the area as well.

This is me (red jacket, white helmet, black trousers) and Simon (a J2Skier friend) enjoying the comforts of the windscreen :)

The holiday was 'officially' Sunday 2nd to Sunday 9th February, but because it wasn't a package holiday everyone could make up their own minds how they got to the Gran Baita hotel in Folgarida, and back.

I decided to ski 8 days, and get to Folgarida from Verona airport, and back, on the train. So, I flew from Gatwick to Verona on Saturday 1st and back on Monday 10th, with BA (cost £100 return). I was planning on getting the airport bus to Verona train station, but the Italian couple sitting next to me on the plane very kindly offered me a lift in their taxi :)

I'd arranged to meet CatP at Verona train station. She'd flown from the U.S. to Milan Malpensa, stayed in Milan overnight, and made her way on the train to Verona. We travelled from Verona to Trento (the nearest mainline stop to Folgarida, on the line to Munich) which only cost us 7 euros each. We missed the express train, which only takes an hour, and got the slow train which took about 1 hour and 40 minutes. Then, we simply walked across the square in front of the train station to our very posh hotel - The Grand - in Trento, which only cost us 93 euros for the room including breakfast for the 2 of us. This hotel is like a marble palace - incredibly luxurious - and the staff were very kind to us and the supper was fantastic :)

We made an early start the next morning and caught the Dolomiti Express train from the station close to the mainline station (which cost about 5 euros for each of us). This is a train which serves the local villages all the way to the ski area at Folgarida/Madonna di Campiglio. It takes about an hour and a half to get there, and I'd discovered that we could get out in Daolasa where there's a gondola right next to the train station so we could start ski-ing practically straight away :)
I'd arranged with one of the ski hire shops to take our luggage back to our hotel in Folgarida (which they did free of charge) so we hired skis (for me) and boots (for Cat), got changed, left our luggage and went up the gondola.

Once we were on the slopes the first thing I noticed was how crowded they were - mostly with families with kids and ski schools, and then that most of the people weren't very good skiers/boarders, and finally that most of them were Eastern Europeans. Eventually we discovered that it was the Polish half-term that week, which explained this!

For me, anyway, it was an enormous contrast to Tignes where I was used to being one of the worst skiers on the slopes. In Folgarida we found ourselves overtaking most of the people on the pistes. Presumably this is because Tignes has a reputation as a resort for advanced skiers whereas Folgarida is better known for beginners and lower intermediates. However, there were some expert skiers, and the following Sunday I met up with some Italians who were there for the off-piste ski-ing.

The first day Cat and I skied back down towards Daolasa (you can only ski half way down to it), and down to another village near there - Marilleva. The red run down to Marilleva is pretty long and it's fairly challenging to ski all the way down without stopping, especially when coping with chopped up powder snow . Coming back, there's a gondola half way up followed by a chair and it was really funny because later on in the week when I was ski-ing with some of the others in the group we totally forgot to get out of the gondola until the lift guy asked us something in Italian and we shot out of it and he very kindly grabbed all our skis for us :oops:

Then we skied over to Folgarida and I didn't know what the hotel mini-bus looked like or where it picked us up, so I phoned someone else in the group because I was pretty sure they were there by then, and found a whole gang of them in the pizza restaurant in the village, and they pointed out the mini-bus to me :)

Out of the 22 of us, Cat and I arrived on the train/skis, 7 people in 3 cars that had come out from the U.K. (although Daved had been in Italy for a week already), 11 in the mini-bus taxi from Verona that Ian had organized, and 2 on the public shuttle bus from Milan Bergamo - the FlySki bus.

The hotel hadn't even asked us for deposits, and when I got there I found they were giving out vouchers for the reduced price 6 day lift passes which we took to the lift office in the morning, and we didn't even have to pay for those until the end of the week! I didn't have to handle anyone else's money - everyone was responsible for paying for their own hotel bill etc.

We went into the Orso Bruno mountain restaurant where they make pizzas in a proper oven in front of you, and have really delicious cakes :)

My first introduction to the cooked sandwich was in Verona train station, and all the mountain restaurants seemed to do this, whether it was a round roll with lettuce and cheese in it, or a huge thing about 6 inches square (foccacia) with aubergines, mozarella and courgettes etc. in it. I don't know any Italian but they all seemed to know what a vegetarian sandwich was. It was rather more difficult trying to persuade them to give me tea - I had to specify English Breakfast tea bag, hot water, and cold milk, or I got some other very strange combinations! And as I said before, the hot chocolate was nothing like any hot chocolate I've ever had before - it was so thick you could practically stand a spoon up in it! And a drink and a toasted sandwich only cost around 6 euros :)

Nice write up, Ally, sounds like a good place to go.

But...it's a railway station not a train station!!!!!!

All of the above and more.

It was a long way to drive but the 6 of us that drove down together (2 cars) stopped overnight at Memmingen where we were able to sample the local ale.

Arrived lunchtime on the Sunday at virtually the same time as the minibus. A quick trip to the ski shop to get those who were hiring togged up and then a meet up in the bar before supper.

We went out in different groups each day as suited, which worked well as there was always someone who wanted to do more or bale out depending on how they felt, so no one got left out.

The little pizzeria in Flog got quite used to us stopping off for a small libation at the end of the day before catching the shuttle bus back to the hotel.

There really was too much snow but I am not complaining, better that way than none. The bonus is that I now have no fear of skiing in the fog or flat light or driving snow, as I got to practice quite a lot! But boy, when the sun did come out the place was spectacular.

I would definitely go back there.

And on the way home 4 of us stopped off in Colmar overnight to break the journey and went out for a nice meal to finish off the holiday.

Happy days, roll on 2015, where shall we go? And who is coming with us?

Obviously still learning how to add video - Doh!