On Saturday 13th February 2016, 40 students and 4 staff members of the Chalfonts Community College embarked to a ski trip in Andorra (a country in the Pyrenees) for a week. This would be exciting for everyone, who could ski, couldn’t ski or just wanted to explore this white-wonderland. A P.E. teacher led the group to this exotic location. I interviewed a first time skier, from year 12 about the trip.
Leaving the Bus from the School on Saturday, it was a 40 minute drive by coach to Gatwick where they would fly to Barcelona. The flight time was 1 hour and 30 minutes; at this point it would be 3 and a half hour drive by coach again from the airport in Spain to resort in Andorra. When I asked the student about the skiing itself she said; “I enjoyed the experience of skiing for the first time”. She also stated that when she stood at the top of one of the mountains, “It was amazing.” There were three group levels who went on trip; Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced. Even though the student I interviewed was only in the Beginner group she found that she “learned a lot” for instance “how to do a snowplough, parallel stop and I began to parallel turn”. With my own personal experience as a skier for many years, this sounded very adventurous for a beginner group. She even surprised me in the interview when she said “I went down a couple of Red runs” (for those who are quite experienced). On the first few days of skiing, she did say; “it was a bit intense”. A good feature to a school trip is when everyone gets on with each other. I asked if this trip had that quality, “everyone got on”. When people go on a trip like this there are always highlights. She found that it was really funny seeing one of staff members being silly and singing karaoke to another teacher with a popular rap song. I laughed because somehow I can relate to this, as I’ve experienced this when I went on a school ski trip. The question though, was the trip popular enough for there to be another one?
