Cross-Country Skiing in Oberammergau

Greg and I had a beautiful time cross-country skiing in Oberammergau a few weekends ago. I'm worried that it might have been our last cross-country skiing trip of the season because February already full of other weekend activities and the weather has been spring-like recently. And then it's March, which should technically be spring, right?

It only took us about an hour and 45 minutes to get up there on the train, and the ski rental place was just down the street from the train station. We went with the trail along the river for the first kilometer or so. Then, we were in a flat-ish meadow (which is good for me because I tend to fall when I'm faced with even a slight downhill). With this particular trail, you could get all the way to Ettal, which is a monastery established in the 1300s in a valley amongst the Alps, but we didn't have the steam for it this time. The trail was lovely and quite easy. Nonetheless, people (even the 70+ year old men) were still passing us left and right.

At a good turnaround spot, we stopped at a little restaurant so we decided to stop for drinks and ordered a very good Kaiserschmarrn - a thick, scrambled eggy pancake-esque dessert sprinkled with chopped almonds, raisins and sugar, and served with apple sauce. Maybe it doesn't sound good, but it really is.

And some photos from our first trip there with my family the first summer we were in Munich:

Ettal monastery with Alps in the background



Greg and Gil trying on traditional Bavarian hats

Cross-Country Skiing in Bayerischzell

Greg and I took a train about an hour and a half from Munich to a town called Bayerischzell (pronounced "by-risch-tsell") in the Alps. We were on the train with a lot of downhill skiers and snowboarders, but we were on our way to do some cross-country skiing. And it was a beautiful day for it - bright and sunny, not too cold, some wind (warm at times even).

Greg on the trail

We're not hardcore skiers and this was immediately obvious because people were passing us left, right and sidewise. Especially when I got scared I wasn't going to make it up a little hill while going parallel on the skis. I thought for sure I was going to fall into the river ditch and so plopped down in the middle of the trail to pull myself along past the scary section. The people behind me didn't think it was very funny, but then again, I think Greg and I were the only ones laughing on this trail at all. Everyone else was doing some serious exercise.

Not sure how this happened, but my hair frosted itself!

I would say we did a good 8 km trail - a warm chalet stop along the way would have been nice, but there were sadly none along this trail. On the way back, we were greeted with forceful winds, but they were fairly warm so it was not much of a hindrance. Overall, it was a fantastic cross-country skiing day and the trail was superb. We were even lucky enough to grab some seats on the train because we were the first stop on the way back to Munich. The train was packed with everyone tired after a long day of skiing. I'm hoping we get a few more weekend skiing trips in before spring.

Check out the rest of our pictures...

Cross-Country Skiing in Lenggries

We enjoyed a fantastic day cross-country skiing in Lenggries and we actually took along the video cam! Unfortunately, there's no footage of me wiping out, but trust me, I did... quite a few times. But Craig, a teacher friend who came along with his wife Sophie, also fell at the end (and he's Canadian so that's got to be a big disgrace to his country ;-).

We took a train out to Lenggries, which is only an hour away from Munich and has a few downhill ski hills as well. We did about 11 km of the cross-country skiing trails, which were all laid down by a caretaker and previous skiers. There were two tracks for what they call "classic" cross-country skiers, which was what we were doing. And then a trail for "skate" skiing on the side. This was more popular amongst the Germans - this was good for us because it was much less busy on the classic trails then.

Anyway, here's a mini-video Greg shot of us going down a minor hill. Enjoy!