Kleine Scheidegg

It’s a good thing we slept well on our last night, because that’s where things started to go wrong. We were told at reception we couldn’t pay our bar bill until the next day. Hints that we were leaving at 5.45am cut no ice, so I had a swift word with the excellent restaurant manager, who promised to sort it out. In ten minutes we had a complete listing, paid up and went to bed happy.

Next morning we left our cases with our ski boots and skis and waited in the dark deserted lobby for the porter to arrive and take our cases to the station in time for the 6.05am train. At 5.55am he had not appeared, but a pleasant and efficient young girl arrived, opened up the reception and telephoned the porter while we went down to the ski room and dragged our cases out into the freezing darkness, prepared to trundle them down through the snow to the station. The porter came running up the hill (the path up to the hotel isn’t long, but performs a z to make the slope more do-able), threw open the garage doors, backed out the little cart, which is more like a motorised sledge and open to the snow and wind, and caught us up at the first bend. He caught the other couple halfway to the second bend and roared off to the station with all our luggage piled in the cart behind him. The train pulled in two minutes later and we all jumped in to be out of the cold. Phew!



Wengen

At Lauterbrunnen it was off the train and haul the cases, boots and skiis across the rail lines to the waiting coach, which was already nearly full. Forced to sit separately, I slept most of the three and half hours to Geneva airport. There we encountered the most enormous queue I’ve ever seen at an airport – numerous flights forced into one line to go through customs. Not only do you have to be fit to ski, but to complete the journey!