J2Ski Holiday 2014

Tony_H wrote:Good old, minibuses to the lifts. And you lot moan about taking a short bus ride to the slopes in certain resorts.
Tssk

Tony - the hotel mini-bus to the lift was much nicer than using a public bus :)
1. It was only a 5 minute walk so if you didn't want to use the mini-bus you could always walk.
2. The driver, Dmitri (or however you spell his name) was really nice and he just took you when you were ready - it wasn't like you had to be there at a certain time or anything - and you could wait for your friends (if they were late) in the hotel lobby, or in the Pizza place in the village on the way back.
And on my last day I was ski-ing for a while before I realized I'd left my mobile phone in my room, so I walked back to the hotel and Dmitri took me back to the slopes in the mini-bus even though it was past the time when he was supposed to be doing that :)
3. When one of us left our phone in the mini-bus he turned up at dinner to give it back :)
4. The mini-bus went right from the hotel door, and picked us up after ski-ing just across the road from the gondola, and if we wanted to do some shopping first, or something, he'd take our skis for us and unload them outside the hotel.
5. When we had a slight mix-up and thought someone had stolen a pair of skis, Dmitri sorted it out for us :)

I am very much in favour of hotel mini-bus delivery to and from the slopes, if they're all up to this standard! I would definitely give the Gran Baita a 10/10 score for this service :thumbup:

Glad to hear that you all had a great time, although I kinda knew you would. It doesn't matter how quiet it is at night when you take your own party with you. :-) It's a nice little resort in a superb ski area and I'd certainly return. In fact, the only reason we didn't go for a third visit last year was that the kids wanted to compare the experience of skiing in a different country.

Gaz C wrote:Glad to hear that you all had a great time, although I kinda knew you would. It doesn't matter how quiet it is at night when you take your own party with you. :-) It's a nice little resort in a superb ski area and I'd certainly return. In fact, the only reason we didn't go for a third visit last year was that the kids wanted to compare the experience of skiing in a different country.

You're quite right - Folgarida is a very quiet place. The others went out to the Eta Beta bar one night, but it hardly seemed worth it really. The bar in the Gran Baita was fine, and they had a huge lounge area for everyone to meet up after ski-ing and have a drink and a chat :)

I think the drinks were reasonably priced, both in the bar and in the restaurant at dinner.

Hotel minibuses seem to be part of the deal in lots of Italian resorts. It's just another one of those little things that makes the Italian experience so civilised. I think every hotel in Folgarida has its own minibus; we even used the one at the Renzi, which was about 150m from the lifts. I have also used them to get to the lifts in Courmayeur and Gressoney and in Sauze d'Oulx the hotel minibus would even pick you up in town after a night on the 'razz'! I think the Italian word is 'simpatico'. ;-)

Mind you, I'll bet poor old Dmitri was ready for a 'lie down' after you lot had driven him up the wall with lost phones and mixed up skis! ;-) :-D

AllyG wrote:

Gaz C wrote:Glad to hear that you all had a great time, although I kinda knew you would. It doesn't matter how quiet it is at night when you take your own party with you. :-) It's a nice little resort in a superb ski area and I'd certainly return. In fact, the only reason we didn't go for a third visit last year was that the kids wanted to compare the experience of skiing in a different country.

You're quite right - Folgarida is a very quiet place. The others went out to the Eta Beta bar one night, but it hardly seemed worth it really. The bar in the Gran Baita was fine, and they had a huge lounge area for everyone to meet up after ski-ing and have a drink and a chat :)

I think the drinks were reasonably priced, both in the bar and in the restaurant at dinner.

What pee'd a lot of folks off was that they ran out of tonic, Vodka and different sizes of the bottled beer and were very slow to replace them infact the tonic was never replaced which ran out mid-week .......

Ian Wickham wrote:
What pee'd a lot of folks off was that they ran out of tonic, Vodka and different sizes of the bottled beer and were very slow to replace them infact the tonic was never replaced which ran out mid-week .......

Really? No-one told me about that - what a shame :cry:

Just as well I brought my own private supply of drinks making equipment :wink:

Gaz C wrote:

Mind you, I'll bet poor old Dmitri was ready for a 'lie down' after you lot had driven him up the wall with lost phones and mixed up skis! ;-) :-D

Actually, Dmitri was laughing like anything when he told me about the lost skis and the Carabinieri - so much in fact that it took me ages to discover what he was talking about - all I knew was that it was about the skis and the police, but clearly it wasn't too serious because he wouldn't have been laughing like that otherwise :lol:

And after the others had all gone he told me that I have very nice friends :D

And seeing that we're discussing the hotel, and how nice my friends are, here's another photo, given to me by Sinbad14.

We're standing outside the Gran Baita at 8-30 a.m., ready to get in the minibus. And we have, from left to right, Sinbad14, me, and Old Boarder with his 2 kids.



The hotel is set back from the main village, in the woods. Cat and I had a twin room at the back with a great view overlooking the woods and the mountains, with a balcony. As far as I know all the rooms in the hotel are en-suite, but some are family suites with 2 bedrooms sharing one bathroom. Our room was fine - not posh like the Grand Hotel in Trento - but perfectly adequate for us, and very clean, and they came in each day when we were out and made the beds and changed the towels etc.

I thought myself that the hotel was very spacious with large public rooms. They had a separate breakfast and dining room, for example. And during the day they always had someone available at the reception or in the office behind. We had 2 birthdays in the group whilst we were away and they put up a 'Happy Birthday' sign in reception and made a birthday cake and brought it in at dinner with lighted candles, so that we could all sing 'Happy Birthday' :)

I found all the staff very helpful, and although their English wasn't very good they did their best to help us with whatever we needed. Flora and Enza were very kind and helped me to check the train time-table back to Trento on the last Sunday, and booked the taxi for us to take us to the station.

Some of the others have said they were disappointed with the food in the hotel, and would only give it 5/10 :(

I had noticed that the food was rather strange, but I put it down to the fact that I was in Italy! We had a choice of 3 starters, and 3 main courses, and different desserts, and one day I'd selected 'cheese' as a main course and I was rather surprised when it turned out to be a plate of different cheeses with a dish of honey in the centre! However, I adapted to the situation by giving half the cheese to the others on my table (we rapidly became like a real 'family' and shared our food around the table), the honey to Cat (who really liked it), and asked for some butter so that I could make a sandwich out of it using the bread on the table :)

So that actually, I was OK with the food. In any case, they had a large salad buffet of beetroot and grated carrot and beans etc. that we could help ourselves to and fill up on if we didn't fancy the rest of the meal. And, as a vegetarian, there was always something that I could eat.

And for breakfast I only ever eat muesli and drink tea anyway, but apparently the others weren't that impressed with the other items on offer :(

However, I think we all agree that for 350 euros half board per person the food wasn't too bad. And at least it was always ready on time, and we didn't have to queue or wait or anything. We had to select our dinner choices ahead of time and our waitress was very patient with us when we couldn't remember what we'd ordered! Plus, they'd made a special effort to seat us together, on 3 tables, in a separate area of the dining room :)