Ewa (Adam's wife, pronounced Eva), Kuba, Adam, and I went to ski in Austria for the May 1, European Labor Day, through May 3, Polish Independence Day Holidays. I'll borrow some of Adam's enthusiasm to try to describe this one. Here's his description:

We're just back from skiing in Austria. Oughh man!!! It was just great. For me the best skiing ever. Amazing landscapes and views and the Alps - these mountains are just overwhelming. We went skiing to Switzerland too and we visited Liechtenstein (a very tiny country in Europe containing just couple of villages and 2 cities!!). We were skiing on the glacier so the snow conditions were rather demanding (required some skills to ski with pleasure). To me it was just a great combination: the beautiful mountains around and just a free skiing. We're so tired today and we've got sore muscles but it was worth it! :-)

We left on Friday night, drove for about 14 hours through The Czech Republic, Germany, and Austria. We checked into our lodge, rented skis for me, and were on the slopes by 3PM on Saturday. In Austria we skied on the Pitzter Glacier, which was nice for me. Because of the nature of the glaciers, the slopes are relatively gentle. But on Monday, May 1, we went for the day to Switzerland to ski at St. Moritz. The views and the environment were just stunning, but the skiing was much too hard for me -- lots of steep slopes. Once, I had to take my skies off and hike down the mountain (brings back bad memories for Utah!). May 1 was the last day of the season because some of the higher snow had started melting. That afternoon, they turned on the avalanche warning lights, and we could see some small avalanches, and the potential for some much larger ones!

There's no way the breath-taking views can come across in pictures, but here they are anyway....




There were waterfalls coming down all over the place from the mountain tops draining into small streams like this one:
Here's the gondola we took up. Below are a frozen lake and a small village:

If you look hard enough, you might be able to see how the snow in this picture is hanging over the edge of the mountain. Small chunks had already started to fall:


Just some pictures of us hanging out:






Gross, it's true! They really do put mayonnaise on their French fries -- lots of it:

Here's me and Kuba eating our Germnudle -- it's a big dumpling filled with fruit jam and covered in vanilla sauce and a powder of cinnamon, sugar, and ground poppy seeds. Really tasty!

Liechtenstein seems like a pretty sleepy little country. They use Swiss currency and have most of the same type of stores and so forth, so I think they might as well join Switzerland. Here's the most interesting thing we saw there: