by JLN

Created on: April 02, 2009   Last Updated: April 18, 2009

I'm not an especially athletic person, nor am I one that would expect develop a penchant for any kind of sports that involve strapping planks to your legs and hurling yourself down snow covered mountains. So it was with a slight degree of trepidation that I embarked on my first ski trip at the tender age of 15. It had been organised by my school and, while skiing as a large group often makes it more affordable, it was by no means cheap. Sadly skiing is still the kind of holiday where you will find yourself parting with large sums of money for the privilege of sitting on a coach for 22hours, only to find on arrival that you will be spending the entire holiday jammed in a tiny, self catered room with four other people, one of whom will inevitably snore.

But this is beside the point, because you do not go on a skiing holiday to spend all day cooped up in your room. You go on a skiing holiday, primarily, to ski (perhaps with an eye on having a few too many beers in the evenings and, if you are very lucky, making out with the pretty girl you spent the entire coach journey staring at). So if you are after a relaxing holiday, where your every whim is catered for, then skiing probably won't be for you. In fact the chances are you will return from your first skiing holiday absolutely exhausted, aching from head to toe and sporting a few nice bruises, but with any luck you will have with a huge grin on your face all the same.

As with most sports, skiing is not the kind of thing you are going to become an expert in after 20 minutes, while it may look rather easy (after all, any idiot can fall down a mountain) doing it without immediately going head first into the snow, banging into something, or breaking both your legs is a bit more challenging. As already mentioned, at the time of my first ski trip me and my friends were but 15 years old, and naive arrogant 15 year olds we were at that. So when our skiing instructor told the group to refrain from putting our ski's on, two of the guys are was sharing a room with immediately decided to do the exact opposite, don their ski's, and find out how fast they could go. After literally skiing through the entire group, sending scores of teenagers running in all directions, it quickly dawned on the pair that they had no idea how to stop, nor any clue how to turn. Luckily at this point the parts of their (admittedly rather small) brains responsible for self preservation kicked in and encouraged them to fall over before they skied over

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