The snow turned to rain yesterday evening, then back to snow again just after midnight. We didn’t go out. This morning we were awoken by a howling gale, and it’s still snowing. View from our lounge.
The snow continued. We needed shopping so we ventured out mid afternoon. Wengen is a snowy wasteland.
The weather forecast isn’t great. I feel sorry for the holidaymakers who are here this week – 2 days skiing lost to the weather and probably more to come.
Orkan is a word you don’t want to see in a weather forecast. It means ‘hurricane’. We usually get this once or twice a season, but we had one last week when all the damage happened on the race course, and today we have another. To make matters worse, it is also forecast for tomorrow and Thursday.
The wind isn’t hurricane strength in the village of course, but it’s still strong enough to rearrange our balcony furniture. It’s snowing too – horizontally. Needless to say all the lifts are closed. The webcam up at Scheidegg gives a good impression of the weather up there.
Still, we have a few jobs to do around the house so we’ll sit out the storm and hope the forecast is wrong.
After all the noise and crowds of the past few days it’s nice to see the village back to normal. We had a lovely peaceful drink at the Sunstar last night.
This morning we both woke up with nasty colds. We stayed at home in the warm.
As expected we had a great party in the village last night. Absolutely incredible atmosphere.
Today we have the slalom. The course for this race is really tough, and out of 62 starters only 27 successfully completed the necessary 2 runs. Regrettably Dave Ryding was not among them. The winner was the Austrian hero and pre-race favourite Marcel Hirscher. Pauli was delighted. Here they are together.
After the race, 12,500 spectators have to get home. The vast majority of them don’t live here of course, so there’s a long queue for the train. Pauli and Neil have their press passes so they can jump the queue and head off back to Austria. We’ll be seeing them again next week.
We have a British racer in town – his name is Dave Ryding and he’s competing in the slalom on Sunday. We’ve checked with the manager of his hotel and it looks like we should be able to grab a few minutes with him for photos and autographs. So last night a few of us paid him a visit.
He was very obliging. Dave is currently ranked 8th is the world, so for us this is like meeting David Beckham.
And with Val’s colleagues from Ski School.
We got lots of autographs and even a few freebies. A thoroughly nice guy.
Today we have the blue-riband event – the Lauberhorn Downhill. We popped up to Männlichen to see the air show and watched the race on the big screen in the village. The race is won by the Swiss local favourite Beat Feuz. I expect tonight’s party will be quite lively.
Pauli and Neil arrived last night. Celebratory drinks in Rocks. Pauli is staying with us for the weekend.
Haute cuisine dinner.
Crowds watching the draw for start numbers.
We went for a ski today. Crazy busy with all the spectators. Mandatory selfie with the Eiger.
We’re up early this morning and off up to Wengernalp. From here we hope to see the rehearsal for the air show and maybe spot some of the racers doing their final training run. Work was still going on at the new VIP area but we saw a few people in there so we wandered in. We weren’t challenged and we had the best view of the track imaginable.
First up is the air show. This is performed by the Patrouille Swiss accompanied by a Bombardier airliner from Swiss Airways.
Next came the racers. They fly about 40 metres off the Hundschopf jump at the top of the picture before making the tricky right turn round Canadian Corner where our grandstand is situated.
A great day out, at a total cost of zero.
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