Our last day, so we decided to ski where others were not and sought out good snow and short queues.

We stopped at a great place for lunch, basically a bunch of enthusiastic guys with a big shed up the mountain, no running water, cheap beer, a great value Plat du Jour, and a Mac on shuffle play hooked up to some big speakers…. My Steak Hache tasted as good as the pretentious one from earlier in the week, but was about half the price on a paper plate with more chips. A dying breed it seems….

The wind was getting up to the point where it was quite unpleasant at the top, and our unbroken run of sunshine was clearly going to come to an end, but the weather held out and we completed the first run of 6 days of clear weather I can remember in a few years (we’ll ignore the light cloud on day 1)

It is interesting to reflect on how little the basics of skiing have changed since we first came here. Skis have gone through a couple of revolutions in terms of design and manufacture, the current generation are a lot easier to ski on, but work on fundamentally the same principals. Clothing has gone through a few fashion iterations, but still works on the same principal. We now all wear helmets, which were unheard of outside of competitions 25 years ago, they now give us somewhere to mount our HD digital movie cameras, a VHS-C camcorder was never going to do that…. People used to make a plan, now they stand around talking to each other on their mobiles trying to figure out where the rest of their party are and where they are meeting for lunch…. The lifts work on exactly the same principals but have been refined to a point where they can move perhaps 10X the number of people per hour on an 8 man express chair than the typical 2 man chairs could. People still push in the lift queues, and it still makes a spectacular mess if you get your skis tangled as you get off. The menus I the restaurants are the same, the currency is different, the wine still tastes as good, and the older I get the better the warm bath at the end of the day feels on my aching muscles.