Aged 12 - 51 and ski? Please help!

bedrock barney wrote:
Holidays and flights got far too cheap in the mid 90's and then into the Noughties.

I've just booked flights to Geneva for a family of 4 and I think £80 each (incl baggage) is incredibly good value.

How can holidays and flights be too cheap

Iceman wrote:Barney is totally right

HOWEVER.....falling down....3 or 4 WEEKS on the slopes is just not fair :(

Iceman, I do not drink alcohol, I have an old car that I hardly use (the car uses 25mpg, I can not afford too) and I do two jobs, well not all the time, but when I can

But I get a summer holiday too!!! My parents live in Portugal and although they live 30 minutes from the beach they have a fab natural pool that is great for skinny dipping in on hot summer days.

FallingDown wrote:

bedrock barney wrote:
Holidays and flights got far too cheap in the mid 90's and then into the Noughties.

I've just booked flights to Geneva for a family of 4 and I think £80 each (incl baggage) is incredibly good value.

How can holidays and flights be too cheap

It's too late of course to put right but aviation fuel should have been taxed in the same way that other forms of transport are. It creates inequality in the market place and unrealistic expectations for the general populace. For example, no one can convince me that a flight to Dublin for a one night stag do is acceptable. If it costs say £150 pp then fair enough, but not £30. And I mean acceptable in terms of sustainability in the long term. Planes need kerosene and kerosene derives from crude oil which is a finite resource. Crude oil costs can only go one way. There will ultimately be a "correction" and people's aspirations will have to drop. Unfortunately the transition will be very painful.

That's enough deep thinking. Now where's that bottle of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, flown in cheaply on my behalf. :mrgreen:

B.Barney:

Wondering if you donned the flameproof suit in defense against GLOBAL WARNING, or out of fear of being flamed for saying that "holidays and flights got far too cheap" ?!

---If the latter, then don your flameproof suit back on for a bit, cause I just can not resist the temptation to blow off some steam and flames about this: I wish I could agree with you(!), but at least in my case (living in the US), to go for a one full week ski vacation in a resort of my liking (European Alps, or NW/US or NW/Canada) brings me to a cost of --at the VERY LEAST-- $2500 (~£1600), out of which AT LEAST $1000 is the flight (Boston to Geneva or Muenchen)...

So, don't know about others, but for me $2500 is not exactly an amount I can just drop out of my pocket without really feeling its loss! Consequently, I'd be happy even w/ just one such trib per year (although tw trips would be soooooh much better ;)) ... now if the flights would cost me just arounf £80 (as you quoted your newly booked Geneva fare), then that would be another story: Maybe in such case I would consider to regularly taking 2-3 ski trips per year (which BTW: means the entire vacation-time for most people in the US - I consider myself lucky to get 4wks!).

And I agree with FallingDown: I find it weird to collect answers for this particular survey's questions from 12yr olds (... would you really expect any 12yr old to have a firmly formed opinion about chosing between NZ, Canada, or some othe place in case the snow disappeared from Europe? ... and saying that, it just occured to me that the survey did not list SouthAmerica as a choice.. I'm curios why, because I heard they had decent skiing down there)

-Cat

Nah...nothing to do with global warming. I'm much more concerned about peak oil but that's best debated on other forum sites not an enjoyable skiing site.

bedrock barney wrote:Nah...nothing to do with global warming. I'm much more concerned about peak oil but that's best debated on other forum sites not an enjoyable skiing site.

To me global warming is a load of tosh.
Why are we so arrogant as a species to believe that in the short period of time we have been keeping weather records (must be only a few hundred years) we have gotten it all figured out?

Who is to say a few degrees here and there isn't a normal or random blip in millions of years of the earths weather patterns?

Snapzzz wrote:

Who is to say a few degrees here and there isn't a normal or random blip in millions of years of the earths weather patterns?

Snapzzz, I am inclined to agree that we can be incredibly arrogant as a race, and I think the approach to "global warming" at the moment is wrong, but I should point out that we do not need to have kept weather records ourselves. The planet has done it for us, and by drilling through the ice at the polar regions, or by taking soil and rock samples from other areas, we have a pretty good record of the weather and climate over the past several millennia.

Far Queue wrote:

Snapzzz wrote:

Who is to say a few degrees here and there isn't a normal or random blip in millions of years of the earths weather patterns?

Snapzzz, I am inclined to agree that we can be incredibly arrogant as a race, and I think the approach to "global warming" at the moment is wrong, but I should point out that we do not need to have kept weather records ourselves. The planet has done it for us, and by drilling through the ice at the polar regions, or by taking soil and rock samples from other areas, we have a pretty good record of the weather and climate over the past several millennia.

Yes, you are quite right in that respect but is uspect that in the 4.5 billion years the earth has been in existence even those records are small fry.
Im no scientist but i am in the camp that believes the earth can adapt and evolve and life will also evolve to the new environment.


As long as the tanker drivers do not strike.

Snapzzz wrote:

Im no scientist but i am in the camp that believes the earth can adapt and evolve and life will also evolve to the new environment.


As long as the tanker drivers do not strike.

I fully agree with that statement Snapzzz, but what I doubt, is that humans (and tanker drivers) can be counted among the life that will evolve.

I have these strange pictures in my mind of a visitor to the planet in a million years time, being met by giant cockroaches, all having fun on skis on a planet almost completely covered in ice :shock:

Oops, jus realised this is not the general wibble thread :oops: