The skiing holiday was great!
It was a long time since I'd skied, apart from a one-day intensive refresher course at the snowdome in Milton Keynes. So I was in a "one notch up from beginner" class, which was good --- lots of scope for rapid progress.
But there's so much to learn around the skiing . . . how to use a chairlift . . . how to use the boots (and walk in them) . . . the clothing . . . . I've never been so velcroed. When you go in a shop or cafe, do you just leave your skis outside? How do you carry them?
I'd never really done the "package holiday" thing before, with reps in uniformed jackets and clipboards making jolly announcements through microphones and all that. I'd only seen it on sitcoms on tv, so I assumed it didn't really exist. It does.
And the chalet experience. Normally I'm a die-hard self-catering person, as I want to be able to make a cup of tea or a sandwich when I want one, not eat in a dining room all the time. However the chalet thing appeared to be the best of both worlds. Basically a house which we shared with 6 other people (a friendly bunch), with a kitchen where I could make things and keep milk and beer in the fridge and so on . . . but with a slave who lived in the cellar (with some nocturnal friends apparently) who cooked us three meals a day. He was a good cook, too.
View from our sitting room window:
So we had a sitting room, a kitchen, and so on, which is just what I like, not a hotel bedroom.
I can't really describe the skiing itself, if you haven't done it. It's a combination of scary and fun. Like many things, it's all about breathing and relaxing into it. The pattern of the day for me was a morning session and an afternoon session, where each one generally consisted of getting lifts up the mountain, skiing down to somewhere else (e.g. next village along), then lifts up again, and back to home. Finishing by about 4 or 4:30, because then the sun goes behind the mountains, and although it's not dark, it's really difficult skiing without direct sunlight because there are no sharp shadows and the shape of the snow becomes impossible to discern. You end up skiing into bumps or down dips that you didn't see coming because it's all just flat and white.
Map of the ski area
We were at the South end of Val Claret (which sounds like a sitcom woman's name) approximately where there's a bus stop shown at the bottom of a track labelled "merles".
So typically we might ride up "Tichot" and "Grattalu", ski down into Le Lac, then up "Paquis" and back down "piste H" to where we started. Or up "Fresse" and down into La Daille.
View from the "Fresse" chairlift:
You can sort of see the top in the distance.
Karen at the top:
All in all, a very good week. Had some nice meals, did some crosswords, good company...
