THE LONDON LOG: Add Zermatt to Your "Places To Go" List

I spent this past weekend snowboarding in Zermatt, Switzerland with Will Morse. The End.

Kidding. Have some details:

After going to Turin, Italy, I really really wanted to do one more snowboarding trip while I was in Europe, since the Alps are just a little better than Alpine Valley or Wilmont. So when Will said he wanted to come out to Europe this semester, we agreed that a ski trip would be perfect! We settled on Zermatt for the following reasons:

1. Matterhorn Mountain is there

2. You can't get to Zermatt by car. You have to take a 3.5 hour train from Zurich Airport out to the Zermatt area, AKA it's really remote and nostalgic. But the town itself is pretty big, so once you get there, you can get rides around the area from these little electric cars. hehe

3. TripAdvisor.com rated it the #1 place to ski in Europe

I was sold at reason #1.

Really, we had an awesome weekend. I didn't think that boarding in Europe could get much better than Torino, but oh man I was wrong. The runs in Zermatt were spread out over 3 mountains, with more high speed gondolas than chair lifts. Each run would take at least 40 min to get down, which was awesome and exhausting! The pistes were also long and curvy and a lot flatter than they were in Torino, which was great as steep runs are not all that fun when you are snowboarding. We spent all of Saturday and Sunday on the slopes, the weather was perfect, clear blue skies with zero clouds, so even though the temperature was low, the sun made it seem a lot warmer. We got lucky on that front!

And to make things cooler, we stayed at a hotel on the top of Gornergrat mountain, which was excessive and fancy and really fun.

It was also kinda funny (well it wasn't at the time) because we arrived at like 9:30pm Friday night, so we missed the last 7:30 train that went up to the mountain where the hotel was, so we had to find another place to stay Friday night until the train opened on Saturday morning! So we walked around town and saw...

Hotel Alex!! We really only went in because I figured my sister would have some sort of connection to it. And once we walked in and saw how awesome it was we ended up getting a room for the night.