From being stranded on a foreign highway with a broken down vehicle, to clutching the driver of a snowmobile racing up a mountain in darkness, the first ten hours of a journey to Northern Italy were definitely some of the most difficult.

In January of 2018, two of my best friends and I set out for Milan to visit a friend attending grad school there, and planned to ski nearby in the Alps for a couple of days. Our first destination was northwest of Milan, in the famed Aosta Valley, where the Italian border joins those of France and Switzerland. Just weeks before our arrival, this valley had received record snowfall, essentially their ‘storm of the century’, with a number of avalanches having buried the roads accessing the resorts, causing several deaths and trapping thousands of tourists in villages across the valley. The weather and roads started to clear up closer to our departure date however, so we went ahead and booked a hotel for a night in Cervinia - at Hotel Lo Stambecco. After landing in Milan a week later, we picked up our friend, a rental car, and grabbed lunch before heading into the mountains.

Several hours into a steep and winding drive through the foothills of the Alps, the transmission in our compact Alfa Romeo gave out, enveloping the cars on the road behind us in a smokescreen, which soon also began to flood the cabin of our own car. With only an hour drive remaining, we were forced to pull over, and call Europcar to figure out our options. We also called Lo Stambecco to make them aware of the situation. Since the hotel sat higher up the mountain, it was only accessible via a cable car, which was closing down within the next two hours. With the sun retreating behind the mountains, our expat friend started making arrangements for a tow truck, and a taxi to take us to the nearest Europcar station. We waited half an hour in the cold for the taxi, and then began an hour or so detour to pick up our replacement car at the airport in Saint-Christophe, further down in the valley. Nightfall had joined us by the time we had our new car up and running, so we loaded up and backtracked towards the same mountain roads we had driven in daylight just hours earlier.

With walls of snow ten feet high on either side of the road (I’m not exaggerating here, see the photos below!), we arrived in Breuil-Cervinia close to 10 pm, well after the gondola had shut down. We found a parking spot in the village, and gave the Lo Stambecco staff a call, then waited in the snow next to the gondola with our packs shouldered, until we saw lights coming down the mountain towards us. Three snowmobiles came into view, one pulling a small trailer for our baggage. We thanked the drivers as if they were old friends, then climbed aboard and held on for dear life as we sped up the mountain towards the twinkling lights of a hotel; with a warm meal and room awaiting us.

…

Even after our chaotic first day in Italy, we never caught a break. The next day, we went skiing in a complete whiteout (photos below), which was really difficult being unable to see the terrain ahead of us. We stayed an extra night at Lo Stambecco, hoping to have better skiing weather the next day, but we woke up on day three to an even worse storm, with all ski lifts shut down, leaving us stranded in the hotel for a full day playing cards and drinking wine as a blizzard raged on outside. In the afternoon, the hotel sent us and a couple other travelers down to the base of the village in some sort of ski-run-grooming vehicle, where we had to dig our car of snow drifts in high winds, and put chains on our tires before deserting the mountains and returning to Milan.