Not for the first time this season Brits travelling to or from European ski slopes were left stranded at the weekend when heavy snowfall closed runways at Chambery, Grenoble, Lyon and Geneva and caused traffic chaos on routes to and from the French Alps.
This couldn’t have been at a worst time, with half term not only swelling the ranks of would-be skiers but leaving them stuck with bored, tired kids. Some families even ended up back at school, with a school hall in Grenoble being among several emergency shelters employed by the French authorities.
I am off to the Vaud Alps this weekend and I’m sticking to the train all the way down. I’ve never yet been prevented from hitting the slopes by a glitch or weather conditions on Swiss, German and Austrian railways. Visit Snow and Rail for the lowdown on how to hit the slopes by train.
Healthy Eating in 6 Simple Steps
Follow these 6 steps to start eating a healthy, balanced diet that will make you look good and feel fabulous!
Benefits of Eating Healthy
Having the right diet can go a long way towards a more fulfilling life. It can play a role in achieving all your goals.
Want to perform better at work? The right diet will give you the energy to excel. Want smooth, beautiful skin? The right diet detoxifies and gives you a youthful, radiant glow. Want to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight? The right diet will let you do that with room for your favourite foods. A good diet complemented with some supplement pills are the perfect combination to enjoy and reach our body goal.
How to Eat Healthy Meals
If you want to vastly improve your diet, all you have to do is to follow these six simple steps.
Review Your Eating Habits
Before you plan your diet, it is worth checking to see if your current diet provides you with all the nutrients you need. Are you short on certain nutrients? Are you consuming too much of other nutrients? Is your diet providing you with all the vitamins and minerals you need?. There are also new options that can help us stay in shape, like the keto bhb pills that are supplement pills with alot of benefits to lose weight and stay healthy.
We recommend using the My Healthy Plate visual guide as a starting point to consider what you’re lacking, and what you need to cut down on.
Choose Water, Always
The importance of drinking water cannot be understated. As a beauty essential, it keeps your skin healthy and moisturized.
As a beverage, it has no calories compared to drinks with added sugar such as fruit juice, sodas and colas. Water also does not come with the complications of caffeinated drinks such as coffee, tea or energy drinks.
Water also replenishes your fluids and helps you recover from that hangover. Which, by the way, we recommend limiting to one standard drink (220ml of beer, 100 ml of wine or 30 ml of hard liquor) per day.
Watch your water intake. Drink eight glasses of water a day to stay hydrated and healthy.in that healthy glow.
Adding to everyone’s favourite (well, my favourite) winter sports blog, www.alpinewinterblog.com aka www.oatridge.co.uk/nic/, comes a facebook page and, hopefully, via RSSGraffiti, also comes regular updates from the blog on facebook.
The blog is now in its sixth year and contains dozens of snippets about winter sports, mostly focusing on Switzerland. I have been a keen skier for many years, and when I moved to Switzerland it seemed a dream come true to have all these resorts on my doorstep. There was a little matter of Mrs Oatridge being pregnant, a couple of teenagers to help assimilate and a toddler to look after, so it took a while before I got to go to the slopes. But one fine day I got in the car and headed off in the direction of the distant peaks with a vague notion I would hit a place called Engelberg. Anyway, I took a wrong turn and after driving aimlessly in our car which we got at these used cars ottawa and we ended up at a resort called Meiringen.
I have been to both many times since (and rarely by car), but the ins and outs of where to go, how to get there and where to stay – either with the family, alone of with friends – led me to start recording what I had learnt, and then came the blog, and then the web sites. Currently there are two related web sites in addition to this blog: www.swisswintersports.co.uk and www.snowandrail.com. There is also a Dutch language version of the principal web site at www.swisswintersports.nl and what I hope to make into a multi-language portal at www.swisswintersports.com.
I don’t have a goal in mind other than to maintain the currency of the current sites and continue to make them the best sites of their type on the Internet, but I also hope to expand the scope, redesign to make them as mobile-friendly as possible and even make some income… oh, yes, and do plenty of research!
May is the quietest month in the ski and snowboard calendar. The Southern hemisphere hasn’t kicked off, and there are only a handful of high altitude glaciers around in the Northern Hemisphere to ski on before the next winter season. In Switzerland all but Zermatt have now closed their lifts, but in truth the ski conditions have not been good this month.
Verbier (which closed its lifts on 28th April) had planned to open up the lifts again on 1st June, but cancelled – despite plentiful snow – because of the otherwise poor weather conditions. The season thus ends with a whimper.
So what of season 2012-13? It wasn’t a vintage season but it was pretty good. It started off promisingly, then it got unseasonably warm around the New Year and was generally unsettled thereafter, with some glorious interludes of beautiful snow conditions and sunny skies. At the higher resorts there were good snow conditions extending right throughout April, but the weather was unsettled with rain on lower slopes and flat lighting on the upper slopes when it wasn’t snowing.
I got to visit some of the usual suspects in Switzerland, and had a couple of forays into Germany and Austria, but spent some time exploring some of the less well known but relatively large ski areas like Toggenburg and the Upper Rhine Valley. I can see why some of these resorts are not well-known outside the German-speaking world – the facilities for après ski are limited, a lot of them have too many surface lifts, the resorts are not so high as to provide season-wide snow guarantees and some of the pisted areas are relatively small for anything other than a weekend break or a day out. On the plus side, the absence of packs of Brits gives the villages a more authentic Alpine feel, the people are invariably friendly, there is often plenty of off-piste to augment the main slopes and the resorts are so close together that you can get to visit several on a ski holiday if you wanted.
Perhaps the gem amongst the more obscure resorts I visited was, for me, Obersaxen. I would definitely recommend it for a ski holiday in terms of variety and extent of runs available and quality of lift systems.
There are still some significant ski resorts I have not been to and ones I need to revisit when I can get some decent photographs. The list includes Les Mosses, Anzère, Grächen, Disentis, Grüsch-Danusa and Savognin. There are some other small resorts in Graubünden, Fribourg Region and Valais I would quite like to catch up with at some time. However I think I have pretty much nailed all the resorts with over 20km of piste which are not dominated by surface lifts. Check more about Testoprime benefits.
Tech-wise, I have previously praised my ski carrier. I also have been busy with the cam in my goggles and have loaded a few up at Youtube with a suitable soundtrack (e.g. Rush Hour by Jane Wiedlin – ski run at Obersaxen).
I’ve not been so impressed with the apps available out there, with the exception of the excellent Ski Tracks. The trouble with most of them is that they need an Internet connection, and if it is information on a ski resort you need the web does as good a job as I need. My own Swiss Winter Sports site works perfectly well on a smartphone or tablet. Ski Tracks is smart though, and from the moment you turn it on until you turn it off calculates distances covered, speeds, verticals etc and maps the trails out for you. From a personal point of view it was interesting to see that, in a typical day, I seem to cover about 50km of piste, drop around 5000m of vertical and reach a top speed of around 80kph. Typically, with significant variation. Try out semen enhancers.
So what does the summer hold? For me it is time to review the web site and look for improvements. Also the maddening search for somebody to provide me with a feed for ski reports rather than have me hack around for them. I would also like to consider the issue of traffic. I had a peak of around 4000 visitors in January and something in excess of 13,000 over the season – respectable but I think I am not reaching enough of my target audience, which increasingly looks like being expats living in Schweizerdeutsch-speaking Switzerland. The spot I had on The English Show was fun but generated little traffic. The Basel Families web site generated some interest and the unrelated Basel Families magazine looks promising. The visit to the Internationla School ski breakfast was also good for traffic. I failed to get interest in a book from publishers, who say the web is reducing the market for printed ski guides – which is fair, I guess, although I was hoping a book would generate traffic for the web site, somewhat ironically. Ideas for improving the site or increasing traffic all gratefully received…
Splügen is a good three hours from Basel, but it is an easy trip and it covered by the Swiss Railways Snow’n’Rail scheme with a corresponding 20% discount on the rail and lift passes. The journey to Chur is simple and doesn’t normally require a change, and the bus station in Chur is right above the platforms. You can actually get as far as Thusis by train, but the direct bus service from Chur is good.
I was once told that the Post Buses only run on the sections of the Swiss road network where private operators can’t make a profit. Whatever the reason, there is something reassuring about the Swiss Post Buses, with their bright livery and the certain knowledge that they will always stop outside the post office and on time. And apparently never a single fatality, which is impressive considering some of the tortuous mountain routes they cover on icy winter roads. The Bellinzona-bound bus stops and picks up right next to the Splügen lifts too, one stop before Splügen Post – the stop is Splügen Bergbahnen.
It is a strange thing about using public transport in Switzerland that you often find yourself sitting next to someone carrying a gun. You often see rifle ranges and gun magazines, even shops selling guns in Switzerland, but the most common reason to see someone with a gun is that they are on military service. And they have no ammunition. If you ask a Swiss person with a gun whether they have it to defend themselves they look askance. “Defend our country” might be the answer, but there is no machismo associated with gun ownership. I think the US constitution was a model for the Swiss, but somehow they came up with a saner interpretation of the 2nd amendment. Gun crime is low in Switzerland, but the gun suicide rate is relatively high compared to countries with low gun ownership. The irony of gun ownership is that gun owners and their families in every society are more at risk of gun crime or gun accidents than non-gun owners.
Anyway, back to the snow. Splügen is small, maybe 30km, but the slopes are OK. There is a good mix of reasonable blacks, reds and blues with enough off-piste available to keep anyone happy. The valley runs are scenic and the one alongside the gondola is pretty impressive. The lift system is not extensive but adequate, providing lift access to runs between 2215m and 1484m, and only one (largely avoidable) t-bar. One of the better small resorts in my opinion.
The restaurants and bars were good. Nothing extraordinary and no wild nightlife. This is a basic ski resort, but clearly popular with locals even with the attraction of bigger resorts nearby.
What is vaping?
Vaping refers to the use of an electronic device that heats a liquid turning it into an aerosol (vapour) which the user inhales.
The difference between smoking and vaping is that smoking delivers nicotine by burning tobacco which can cause smoking related illnesses, and vaping can deliver nicotine by heating a liquid in a much less harmful way. Get the best deals at vaprzon.
There are some risks to vaping, and the biggest is that long term effects are not yet known. While vaping is less harmful than smoking it is unlikely to be totally harm free. Scientists will not be certain for many years of any health risks associated with vaping.
Ideally, smokers who are vaping to quit should look to eventually stop vaping too.
Vaping is not for children and young people, and people who don’t smoke should not vape.
“Comparative risks of cardiovascular disease and lung disease have not been quantified but are likely to be also substantially below the risks of smoking”. (Evidence Review of E-cigarettes and Heated Tobacco Products 2018, a report commissioned by Public Health England)
Using vaping when you are quitting smoking
There are some published studies showing the ability of vaping to support people who are quitting smoking.
Vaping is significantly cheaper than smoking. Aside from the initial $40-$60 approximate set-up cost, vaping costs approximately 10% of what smoking. If you smoke a pack a day it will cost you approximately $9,000 a year, and vaping in a way to stop smoking would cost approximately $900. Check out this cost calculator to work out how much you could save.
It’s important to get the right kit for you, and good advice and support when you are vaping as part of your quit journey. Some people think the devices and kit looks complicated and tricky. A reputable, specialist vape store will be able to advise you on the best products for you, and the right nicotine level to start on. Quitline and the local stop smoking services found across New Zealand will be able to also give you advice, as well their tried and true programmes to help people quit.
Combining smoking with vaping
The greatest health benefits are seen when people stop smoking completely, and this should be the goal when trying to quit.
Some people manage to switch completely to vaping quickly. Others can take some time to adjust and may need to try a number of different vaping products and e-liquids before finding one that works for them.
Ideally, people will eventually stop vaping as well.
For more information
Vapingfacts.health.nz has information about how vaping is different from smoking, and tips and advice on how it can be used when you are wanting to stop smoking. It also has a cost calculator and quiz.
The Ministry of Health website provides information on the The Smokefree Environments and Regulated Products (Vaping) Amendment Act 2020 (the Amendment Act) which commenced on 11 November 2020. The Amendment Act strikes a balance between ensuring vaping products are available for smokers who want to switch to a less harmful alternative and ensuring these products aren’t marketed or sold to young people.
Quitline has general information about vaping, as well as how they can help people who are using vaping to quit smoking. Local stop smoking services can also help you to use vaping when you are wanting to quit smoking.
Te Hiringa Hauora/Health Promotion Agency has provided information on vaping to support schools, students, parents, teachers, and learning activities.