We have discovered a new kind of bread. It is called Savouet and was only launched in 2011. It is made with “a semi-wholemeal flour rich in fibre and slow carbohydrates.” Apparently it has all kinds of health benefits and the wheat is all grown in the Savoie region.

This was a bit complex for the lady in the bakery to translate so she simplified it to “slightly grey”.

Which we feel is slightly underselling it but I fear we will now always refer to it that way!

Suitably full of bread and jam we decided to go up Mont Vallon before it got too crowded and nearly succeded.

Almost makes you feel sorry for the people down in the valley under the cloud.

In our ongoing quest to seek out picnic spots we found one above Les Menuires with a great view (i.e. away from the resort). If you look carefully you can see that some people go to enormous lengths to get here before the last table goes.

We could not go Les Menuires without visiting La Masse. They don’t have the fancy electronic selfie things here they have a far simpler solution, big mirrors. (see last year’s blog for the other one they have, not sure what is behind this one or what exactly is coming soon, or when).

They also have an exhibition about the telecabine, with lots of information about how it works and how it was built, and this lego model.

Feels like it is missing a bar with people dancing on lego tables but otherwise pretty impressive!

With the weather set fair we headed to VT in search of the best snow.

The summit of Orelle at 3250m did not disappoint, although a couple of the runs could use a going over with a basher.

Orelle was surprisingly busy with the one restaurant completely rammed. But we have a secret picnic spot behind this place where we managed to get a seat (no I am not going to tell you where it is)

Back over Cime de Caron, I can’t resist photographing this view even though I have done it many times.

Due to some carefully planned navigation we just happened to go past Chalet Val Thoren as we were headed back, but the waffle man was having a day off! Apparently this place is ‘Le 360°, concept de « fooding-clubbing » posé à 2400 mètres d’altitude à Val Thorens au milieu des pistes, ce lieu est unique au monde, une ambiance hors du commun avec des DJ’S réputés !’

Apparently it is Belgian Week.. no, I have no idea either. We thought about going and making some shapes on the dance floor but there was a queue to get in.

We think they were probably checking ID and only letting in people under 30..

The queue for La Folie Deuce was longer than the queue for the lifts, so dancing on the tables is ski boots will just have to wait.

Anyway a great day’s skiing, 39KM and 5800 metres vertical.

On the piste map and the signs, Courchevel 1650 seems to have rebranded as Courchevel Moriond. Perhaps their marketing folks thought people would see 1650 as not as good as 1850? 1850, meanwhile, has rebranded as just Courchevel, but listening to people in the bubble it seems that all of these are waaay too many syllables to be cool, and so refer to 1650 as 16.

There is a good depth of snow, but there has been no substantial fall for a few weeks so it is hard and icy in places and in the past in these conditions 16 (formerly known as 1650) has been less icy so we headed over there.

Sure enough, some great snow. Yet another new children’s fun park has appeared. This one is western themed with the theme carried all the way to the signs on the toilet doors…

We stopped for lunch at the top of the Signal chair. Now some people will have noticed the rather dodgy looking benches in yesterday’s pictures. Nothing like that here. It looks like the lift company maintenance team have made these from welded steel box section, and they are going nowhere. They even have brackets so they can be lifted and moved by a basher, because they didn’t get there any other way!

And yes, that is someone wearing a kilt, and yes, he is drinking whisky and no, I didn’t ask….

So another new innovation we have is the ‘moment’. Some of the lifts have a camera that takes pictures of each chair as it goes up. They show you a number as you get of, assuming you are not concentrating on not crashing in to people, and then near the lift is a place where you can select the picture, swipe your lift pass, which gives them you email address, enter your email address again and they send you an email. You click on the link, give them your email address one more time…. and then you get the picture!

It seems that real life is catching up with Wii ski… we’ll try and do the expressions next time.

Now this is the view you want to be greeted with out of the apartment window. Sadly I can’t admire it over my coffee as the supermarket was closed by the time we arrived last night so we need to go out and get some…

We decided to take it relatively easy today, so we stayed in the Meribel valley. Lunch was a sandwich at the bottom of Mont Vallon.

A bit more skiing and then an afternoon coffee at Pierre Plats. We have moaned enough about the demise of the brilliant ‘self’ that used to be here. It is now a coffee stop with a great view and still well worth a visit.

Our apartment comes with an unexpected benefit. Standard procedure for an apartment building ski room is to have one wobbly bench to sit on while you put your boots on. The bench is usually occupied by several squabbling teenagers and is located as far as possible from the timer for the light, which has been tuned to ensure that when you finally get to use the bench the light goes out just when you have a boot half on. This is so normal that I have always assumed it was a planning condition and no other configuration was allowed.

In a radical break with tradition, this building has several benches just outside the ski locker room with real lights and racks to stop other people’s ski raining down on your head when you bend down to tighten your boots!

According to my phone we skied 26.8km today, and 5KM vertical. My top speed was 37mph but I don’t think that was intentional.

Pre pandemic ( and pre brexit) Eurostar used to run a direct service from Ashford to Moutier. This was a really good idea.

Post pandemic (which I think is an acceptable way to describe 2024?) they have never really brought this service back.

For the early part of the 23/24 season they are running a service from St Pancras to Moutier on a Saturday, returning on a Sunday. The service ends the week before half term, and it is not direct, you have to change at Lille Europe. This is very clearly not nearly as good an idea at many levels

So here we are on the last run of this service, having departed Lille Europe on an ageing Thalys single deck TGV that has been lightly rebranded Eurostar (they’ve put a Eurostar sticker on the outside)

As you can see we are travelling premiere class as part of our ongoing campaign to avoid our children having to pay inheritance tax. And this means we get a complimentary breakfast.

Part of the vegan breakfast was a coconut yoghurt. The lid puzzled us, do you think this is a serving suggestion?

There is also no luggage space, but everyone is being terribly polite and British about it.

The views approaching the alps by train remain as stunning as they are impossible to photograph.

We are now used to the bus drivers treating the timetable as just a guide and deciding amongst themselves what buses to drive where, but we made it to our apartment without further drama. Usually of course we would have square pillows and rectangular pillow cases… This time they have managed to give us square pillowcases… so of course the pillows are rectangular!

You need to scroll all the way back to the last entry of my last ski blog to understand the title of this one…

The forecast for our last day had been bad for some time so we had almost written it off in our minds. We headed off at the start of the day to see what we could find anyway.

Despite a forecast of heavy snow there were actually some breaks in the cloud. There is something magical about being up in the mountains amongst the clouds, if only it was not so hard to ski! It literally went from whiteout to sunshine and back. One minute you think you have accidentally joined an alpine survival course, the next minute you are feeling overdressed for the beach… My photochromic visor must have been exhausted. Although the rain / snow level was supposed to be 2000m, in the resort (which is 2300m) it was snowing at the top and raining at the bottom.

They won’t be putting that one in the brochure…

Good to know my aging ski gear is still waterproof (I think I said that 5 years ago as well!) however the ski trousers I bought as seconds in a market in Beijing in 1997 fell victim to a splinter on a picnic bench. 3 days of chairlifts later and the duck tape is still fully waterproof… Maybe I can find some tape the right shade of red?

After lunch, the weather deteriorated and even the resort was disappearing, so skiing was abandoned at afternoon coffee.

This gave us an excuse to head to the new VT sports centre swimming pool. The sports centre is called “the board” because the roof is shaped like a snowboard apparently.

For our last meal in VT we headed back to the restaurant we started the week in, which is actually in the same building as our apartment. As far as we can tell a good number of the staff live in the building, we keep bumping into them in the corridors. If you take a wrong turn looking for the ski lockers you end up in the beer cellar! It turns out they do fondues for one… well it would be rude not to…

So tomorrow we run the gauntlet of some riots in Paris again….

The forecast was not so good today. We have been used to getting up as high as we can nice and early and being greeted with scenes like this from yesterday

Today was more like this

The tourist information office has a long complex forecast, which is never right, other than on this occasion they predicted the cloud base at 3000m pretty accurately, we had to ski down about 200m from the top of Caron to get out of the cloud. Le app simply marks most days as sunny intervals and is bound to be right occasionally.

We decided to get as many runs on Caron in as we could while the light held. On one trip we spotted a punnet of strawberries (assuming that is the correct collective noun for a group of British students dressed in strawberry costumes). I did not manage to get a picture of them but as we skied down we noticed a bit of green in the middle of one of the steeper parts of the run. One of the strawberries had clearly lost her stalk. I picked it up and carried on down until I spotted them in the distance. Strawberry 4 was struggling to keep up with the rest of the group so I skied up alongside her and said “is this yours?” She thanked me profusely before heading off to try and catch the rest of the punnet. I didn’t get to ask which university she was from.

We have been seeking out the picnic spots for lunch. This one from yesterday was pretty awesome.

Today’s was more than a little hard to find… it didn’t seem to have occurred to anybody to make it accessible, with or without skis!

We stopped off for coffee at the waffle cafe, and we were just chatting to some other brits when they turned to music up and some dancers showed up.

I’m guessing that is not a traditional Savoyarde costume? They tried to persuade us to get up and join in but I very much doubt her professional insurance covers dancing with me in ski boots!

We decided we had to visit La Masse so headed over early before the bottom of Les Menuires got too slushy. The snow was pretty wet even at 10AM so who knows what it is like in the evenings, but the base is thick enough that you don’t see any rocks.

Anyway La Masse has a new gondola right to the top with a viewing platform with these novel metal things that when you align all the letters, the arrow is pointing at the mountain.

It also has a really good selfie mirror.

What many people don’t spot is that it is actually a one way mirror, and is the window of the gents toilet. So if you go in there you are looking out on what appears to be groups of people lining up to take pictures through the window into the gents toilet. Where else in the world would come up with that?

The skiing at the top of La Masse was brilliant but you have to get through Les Menuires at some point on the way back so we decided to head back to VT before lunch and head up to Cime Caron again. Here is a bit of video of one of the runs down.

Several correspondents have asked us to report on the lunch situation in the mountains. Most of the eating places on the mountain in VT have both a snack part, burgers chips et al. which will set you back between Euro 10 and Euro 15, and a restaurant part with proper meals that will set you back a lot more. Unlike Meribel there are one or two left with a “self service” but we have not investigated them further.

Les Menuires has a few bargain places.

Although with a croque monsieur at Euro 9.50, I am never going to complain about lunch being £9.00 in London again.

The summit of La Masses has meal deals

We spent the afternoon making the most of being in VT… the party was going strong in the Waffle cafe

And there is more evidence of the products of the UKs finest educational establishments being in town.

44.6KM today apparently. The weather may not be so good for the last 2 days but the forecast changes all the time so there is some hope….

I used to use an app called Navionics Ski.. which had great maps and logged our route. It was free and I never understood why it was free and how they were ever expecting to make any money…. clearly they spotted this because they discontinued it. The 3 valleys used to have a reasonable app, they discontinued that and the current one is pretty hopeless…. so I downloaded a new one called Slopes… you have to pay a small amount to get the best maps, but it is worth all the effort to be able to report that today we skied 39.8Km and were actually skiing for 3H 7M and spent 1H 43M on lifts….

We decided to go over to Meribel but got distracted by Mont Valon on the way. The views are so much better with almost no wind

The snow conditions in Mottaret look pretty bad from a distance

The runs into the resort were OK in the morning, but getting pretty slushy by 2pm, can’t imagine what they will be like by 4pm.

We were going to try out the airbag but I had not brought my gopro so it seemed a waste. Instead, we dropped into Courch…and had lunch at a picnic area at the bottom of Creux. There are quite a few picnic areas and we have got used to taking a sandwich. There are quite a few places to buy fillings here…. as long as you are not Vegan.

We took in another orientation thing on the way back to Val Thorens, I tried to do a 180 degree panorama of it, not sure how well it has worked.

Stopped on the way back for one of these.

And one of these

There is some kind of festival going on at the Waffle cafe… If I knew how to tell the difference between, House, Garage, Bungalow and Alkaline Semi-detached then maybe we could navigate by the beat from the cafes in the fog?

They seem to throw everyone out at 6PM and a swarm of drunks head down the piste and into the bars below our apartment. We suspect some may be students. Clues include a bunch of young men dressed in red hunting jackets, and people using inflatable alligators as toboggans.

Well the weather forecast was for Sunny intervals. In Val Thorens the sunny interval went on for most of the day, with just some high cloud in the late afternoon to keep the temperature down. Other valleys were not so lucky.

We headed out early and got up high, there was a good 20cm of fresh snow on top of well-groomed runs that was great fun to ski in. This picture is from the highest point in the 3 valleys in the Orelle sector.

Les Menuires is in far worse shape, looks like they are relying entirely on cannons at resort level.

They have a new way of testing your travel insurance in VT, if you are bored of the Parapentes, and the luge, well now you can try the zipwire… we have not seen anyone try it yet and it is pretty hard to photograph but let’s have a go so you can marvel at the full extent of the madness.

In the picture above the top of the zipwire is just to our right, you can see the two wires, and I have marked the end of it with a red arrow.

And here we are at the bottom, again the bit where they unload whatever is left is just to our right, and the start is marked with a red arrow… You’ll see that the wire is marked with red spheres, presumably even the VT tourist office don’t consider a parapente hitting a zipwire to be a good idea. Apparently it is a tandem so you can go on it with a friend….

Anyway, lots more fun to be had skiing, went up to Cime de Caron where we have not been for a few years. There are some orientation things pointing out the moutains, to be fair they may have been here for years but I have never been up here when the wind was not trying to blow me off the top so have never noticed before.

The number of bars is steadily increasing.

Didn’t like the DJ in this one…

Thought about dropping into La Folie Douce (“everybody put your hands in the air”) for a cocktail and to get some content for our social… but in the end we decided to head back to the apartment for a nice cup of tea… other beverages are available.