Faff is a Kiwi word for doing (usually) necessary things that take longer than you want them to. Think cooking a nice meal, putting on your shoes and packing your bag while tramping, or going grocery shopping. Our next 3 days were a whole lot of faff.
In Milan we rented a car. A car had been our decision after (1) looking at hostel prices in some of the ski towns we were planning on visiting (up to 170 NZD per night), (2) realizing that if we booked far in advance the field might not even be open or the weather could be bad and then we would’ve wasted our money, and (3) looking at prices for camper vans and realizing that they were still incredibly expensive. So a car it was, and we would just figure out how to sleep in it ourselves.
The second challenge was renting one long enough to sleep in – Europeans like their compact cars. We decided on a Skoda Octavia, which was pretty much guaranteed to be long enough to sleep in. Flat seats were another matter.
On the day of our rental we rocked up too early and had to eat lunch before coming back for our car. I was so nervous we hadn’t come with all the necessary documents, but it was just “sign here, and here, and here, doesn’t matter what you’re signing, maybe you’re signing your life away but who cares you have our car now”. And then we had a car that only I could drive in Italy, and we drove straight into the chaotic city of Milan.
Our first stop was to pick up a down blanket from someone off Facebook Marketplace. Then we went to a hardware store and borrowed a tape measure, measured the car, came up with measurements for the design of a platform, and had the wood cut to length in the store.
That evening we slept in a hostel and built our platform with nails and glue in the city sidewalk. We definitely got some weird looks.
The next morning we realized that the nails and glue wouldn’t be enough, we needed screws. Back to the hardware store for some screws and a Phillips head screwdriver. We also needed a mattress, but not one that was too thick. One option was a mattress topper from Ikea. I had, however, discovered a store that sold exclusively foam, so we found parking (always a nightmare) and gave it a try. It turned out to be a store of very moderate proportions that was stuffed to the brim with foam of all sizes and densities. You could barely even walk through it! It was run by an old lady who spoke no English, and so I managed to get my request across with Google Translate and my very limited Italian. Some discussion later we walked out with a high-density 6cm thick piece of foam that was cut to shape perfectly for our car. It turned out to be an excellent purchase because it is very comfortable to sleep on and very warm, two things which can make or break sleeping in a car.
We spent the rest of the day getting together most of the rest of what we needed to sleep, doing laundry, and looking at some skis. Now for a quick lesson on the different kinds of skis (all things that I had to learn recently as well): there are 3 main kinds of downhill skis. The first are piste skis. The piste is the area of snow on a ski field that is groomed, ie flattened and smoothed. Piste skis are generally fat at the tip, very narrow in the middle, pretty heavy, and designed to go fast. All mountain skis are skis you can ski both on and off piste, so also in areas where there is ungroomed powder snow. They are much fatter in the middle so that you don’t sink into the powder but are still fairly heavy. Touring skis are a similar shape to all mountain skis but are much lighter because when you’re ski touring you are walking up the mountain with your skis first before skiing doen it, which is much easier if your skis are lighter. We wanted to get all mountain skis so that we could ski anywhere that looked fun. Milan, however, seemed to have only piste skis.
We spent that night at a farm that allowed camping and provided a bathroom. We redid the platform with screws, which made it much sturdier, and got into bed for the first time. Getting in and out is difficult – there is very little room between the mattress and the ceiling. Once you’re in bed though it’s comfy and warm.
The next day we started driving towards the ski field. We needed one more thing though – skis. We stopped many times that day looking for skis. Originally the idea was to buy used skis, but used ski stores were almost nonexistent. There is one problem with buying new skis though – they’re very expensive. I had to convince Travis not to buy the first acceptable pair of skis he saw. Finally, around 4, we ended up in Trento. We found an outdoor outlet store that had some good Black Friday deals on skis and both ended up buying skis there (although we bought Travis’s first and went back for mine). I actually decided to get a pair of touring skis – when skiing in New Zealand I had often felt like my skis were too heavy for me to turn them properly, and although I’m quite tall, I’m also very light. I was told that touring skis meant worse performance on the field, but I stuck with my guns, and I’m so glad I did.
There’s one other problem about buying new skis: they don’t come with bindings. Bindings are what your ski boot hooks into to hold you onto the ski. Bindings for piste skis are quite heavy, so we didn’t really want those. Bindings for touring need special ski boots, which we don’t have. We needed a binding that was kind of in between, and also turned out to be very difficult to find. After turning the town of Trento upside down looking for the right bindings, we finally were referred to a shop called The Blue Tomato that had what we were looking for, and Travis bought them minutes before closing while I circled the city center because we couldn’t find a parking spot.
That night we drove up a lonely mountain road with a great view of the city and the mountains and slept in a pullout off the road. The next morning we finally drove to a skifield and had our bindings mounted on the skis. We were skiing by 11am! I felt so much better on my new very light skis than I had on my heavy ones in New Zealand, even though I was not using them for their intended purpose. It was a beautiful first day of skiing.
It took a while and was quite frustrating at times, but after all the faff we did end up with a car we can sleep in and store our skis under the sleeping platform. It’s actually quite elegant all in all, and has cost us much less than any other option would. Stay tuned for updates on the skiing and sleeping in the car – a whole adventure in itself.