The forecast has been telling us for some time that the weather would not be as good today. But it depends on what you call good…

The wind was officially classified as sporty gusting spicy. We sailed off downwind under just the genoa with Bernard having a whale of a time surfing behind us.

So the wind was fun, the problem was the thunderstorms, which at least held off for the time we were sailing.

No lunch stop today. As it was not sunny, we decided it was better to get in early, hide from the worst of the weather and explore our destination a bit.

Here are some pictures from previous days swimming.

I don’t recall seeing starfish before but there are loads of them around the area.

Anyway we arrived and were told where our allocated berth was and guess where we are?

Yep… next to the ferry. It left after an hour or two… not sure when it returns..

Anyway we are in Polace which is inside the Miljet national park.

There are lots of walking routes and mountain bike trails here. You can see from this map which also seems to serve as an outdoor youth centre for the locals. They kindly stopped throwing darts while I took the picture.

The park seems to have a range of ways of charging visitors money, including an entrance fee to the trails but there is a student discount so we sent some crew who could credibly claim those to get some pictures.

The thunderstorms turned up properly in the evening.

The lightning kept knocking out the power to the whole town, but the beer pumps in the restaurant don’t need electricity and the kitchen are obviously used to this because they managed to conjure up some excellent food.

Hopefully this storm will blow through overnight.

I wonder what time the first ferry is?

Not unsurprisingly, when you think about it, sailing around islands you see a lot of ferries. We fully understand that without them would be no beer in the bars but they can be a bit of a pain.ì

This one is a brute… must be doing 30 knots and goes from a small thing in the distance to several thousand tons of noisy steel really quickly

We were woken by another ferry (a car ferry) this morning as it docked next to our boat… this island is very lucky that the first ferry is at 6AM.

Just got back to sleep to be woken by a tapping noise at our cabin window.

We sailed a little further north in the same group of islands (the Elafiti islands) that we had spent the night in and found a great spot to anchor, quite a few other people had the same idea so it was a bit interesting finding a safe spot but we had a great swim and lunch.

If you want to know a bit about the Elafiti islands the restaurant we were in last night doubles as a tourist information point, so you can learn more of their dubious claims to fame here.

Tonight’s restaurant is in Okuklje on the Island of Mljet. The  pontoon is described as rustic….

This flotilla company like to lay on compulsory fun in the evenings and tonight’s activity is a tender rowing race. The person rowing has to be blindfolded and someone else has to navigate and tell them which way to go. Obviously, it would not have been fair on the others if I had taken part so we sent out some of the younger crew and Bernard. If you look closely you can see our tender facing the wrong way.. having Bernard navigate was probably a poor choice, but once one of the oar mountings broke this became academic…

Dinner in a brilliant restaurant inexplicably on the opposite side of the bay from their mooring pontoon.

But no ferries…

Not unsurprisingly, when you think about it, sailing around islands you see a lot of ferries. We fully understand that without them would be no beer in the bars but they can be a bit of a pain.

This one is a brute… must be doing 30 knots and goes from a small thing in the distance to several thousand tons of noisy steel really quickly

We were woken by another ferry (a car ferry) this morning as it docked next to our boat… this island is very lucky that the first ferry is at 6AM.

Just got back to sleep to be woken by a tapping noise at our cabin window.

We sailed a little further north in the same group of islands (the Elafiti islands) that we had spent the night in and found a great spot to anchor, quite a few other people had the same idea so it was a bit interesting finding a safe spot but we had a great swim and lunch.

If you want to know a bit about the Elafiti islands the restaurant we were in last night doubles as a tourist information point, so you can learn more of their dubious claims to fame here.

Tonight’s restaurant is in Okuklje on the Island of Mljet. The  pontoon is described as rustic….

This flotilla company like to lay on compulsory fun in the evenings and tonight’s activity is a tender rowing race. The person rowing has to be blindfolded and someone else has to navigate and tell them which way to go. Obviously, it would not have been fair on the others if I had taken part so we sent out some of the younger crew and Bernard. If you look closely you can see our tender facing the wrong way.. having Bernard navigate was probably a poor choice, but once one of the oar mountings broke this became academic…

Dinner in a brilliant restaurant inexplicably on the opposite side of the bay from their mooring pontoon.

But no ferries…

For reasons lost in the midst of time we decided to pay attention to the people who have been telling us to try Croatia… and try Croatia. So here we are sailing the dalmation coast, starting in Dubrovnik.

We made it to the marina without collecting any more travel anecdotes, a bit later than ideal but just enough time to get the boat sorted in time to go out and find some dinner.

Here is the boat… and I have no idea how I’m going to get it out of there either.

Found a great restaurant which had some cats hoping you would not finish everything…

This boat is with our group

But this one is not

You’ll notice the company we are with this time has tenders we can tow, which saves some hassle, and Bernard is particularly pleased about this.

15 miles of sailing in a nice breeze brings us to a small one restaurant town where we are moored up for the night.

And all in the restaurant.

So the sharp eyed amongst you will have noticed we are skiing Sunday to Sunday… so we get to ski on Saturday. First thing in the morning all the week long vistors are going and the weekenders have not arrived so Combe de Vallon is empty!

Several runs on Vallon then over headed back over to Saulire, stopping briefly at the fun park

Then down the other side of Saulire to Signal for lunch.

There is a handy sign here in case you need to know.

Yet again the cloud built during the early afternoon, we were skiing down from Saulire into the cloud.

We decided to stop for coffee with the other beautiful people of Courchevel at the panoramic restaurant at the top of the Saulire cable car in the hope the cloud might clear.

Maybe we should stop here for lunch one day…

Then again… maybe not.

The visibility became impossible, so we headed down and took just one run in the Yeti Park near our apartment before returning our skis to the rental shop

Let’s just ignore the weather forecast and see what happens shall we?

Another attempt at Mont Vallon succeeded this time. Awesome snow but everyone had the same idea.

Over to VT to see if we can get a run down Cime de Caron. It turns out they broke one of the cable car cabins last year by crashing it into the lift station, so it is closed for the season. They don’t mention this in the three valleys app, they have just removed it from the list of lifts. So you look at the app for VT and it shows everything open… which it is not…

Luckily spotted a good old manual sign on a lift so we didn’t waste any time. Headed over to Orelle where the snow was really good and then got to the top of Caron on the bubble from that side (new in 2021). There is a brand new restaurant up here (the impressive structure on the left).

They must be pretty irritated because it is easy to access from the non working cable car and hard to access from the Orelle bubble so I imagine it is pretty quiet in there, probably wasn’t a cheap thing to build.

Anyway as you can see the weather was deteriorating so we headed down to one of VTs covered lunch huts (now with free WiFi.. I mean really?) and then back to Meribel while we could still see.

Not sure if this is a dinosaur or a dragon we spotted on the way back. Not sure that his tail was working well with chairlifts.

Decided to stop at the Tarte aux Pomme cafe for a coffee. It is only called Tarte aux Pomme by us, everyone else calls it La Sitelle. Apparently it has been run by the same family since 1984 but it is no longer a self and no longer sells Tarte aux Pomme. They do have waffles though

They keep the crowds down by being rude and generally unwelcoming to customers as they arrive. We somehow slipped through their defences and got a table mostly out of the snow.

Really heavy snow made skiing pretty horrible so we called it a day an hour early. Still skied over 55km though.

So today’s masterplan was to head over to Mont Vallon to ski in the fresh powder that had fallen overnight. The forecast was for 40kph winds at altitude, but that seemed manageable.

Arrived at the lift to find they had changed their mind and decided not to open it. Spoke to one of the operators who said they had measured 100kph winds so would try again later… it remained closed all day.

Oddly enough the forecast for VT was less wind so we thought we would head over but the wind on the tip was pretty fierce  were signs warning the links could close so we decided to stay in our own valley.

We found a good future lunch spot.. interesting table if there was no horizontal snow..

Stopped for a break in the afternoon at Le Arpasson cafe. This used to be a favourite years ago, then in turned into a loud music venue, the kind you can feel through the ground before you can see or hear, so we avoided it. This year it seems to be back to a ‘self’ with a nice covered bar area, playing Bruce Springsteen at a sensible volume.

The forecast was for it to brighten up and the wind to drop. Neither happened so we had a few more runs and headed for the apartment half an hour earlier than usual.

Let’s see if tomorrow resembles the forecast in any way.

A day of layered clouds that caused the visibility to come and go in an infuriating fashion.

We decided to ski on the runs above Les Menuires and came across some pretty serious ski training.

They had a huge entourage with them.

We shared saw members of the Swiss Ski team in a lift queue and shared a lift with who coaches who seemed to be Italian but swore in English…

We also came across this group

They were doing some sort of competition if they were able to provide evidence of having a rave in a bubble with strangers. Our best dancer was in another bubble but the rest of the party were able to help them.

We think this lot

Were probably doing the same competition and were apparently dressed as Loraxs? Me neither….

Lunch at a thoroughly over engineered picnic spot in Les Menuires with solar phone charging.

And a post to put your phone in for a selfy

Assuming of course today that you were after a white background.

Our luck ran out 2 runs from home and the cloud came in to create a real “which way is up” whiteout, which made getting back pretty unpleasant. At least we knew where we were going…

Oh and I managed to snap my contactless liftpass in half so had to clomp into the liftpass looking like a bedraggled yeti to persuade them to give me another one.

At least it is now snowing.

Always good to start the day with a bit of fiction… no not the Daily Mail this time the weather forecast. Here is the forecast:

And here is the view out of the window.

In reality it was sunny in the morning with some cloud and snow flurries in the afternoon.

Whenever we talk about skiing here back in the 1990s we get comment like “it must have been so much harder with the dinosaurs” well I can tell you there are just as many dinosaurs today as there were then.

We headed over Courch 1650 to get some pictures for Insta from the far lefthand side of the piste map.

Lunch was had in a spot that has proved very reliable for spotting the local wildlife

Yes, they are skiing in dressing gowns and no, I have no idea why.

In the afternoon we headed back to Meribel.

And decided to grab a coffee at the Rhodos cafe… which we have been visiting for 32 years….

For some reason we decided to visit la Piste Animaux which we think has had an upgrade since we were last here.

It now features some terrifyingly realistic plastic animals to traumatise children.

My watch is suggesting I burned 3000 calories covering 60km in 6 hours…. I wonder how many calories are in a large Tartiflette?

The forecast promised sunny intervals, and this interval lasted almost all day. The snow depth is good but with unseasonably warm temperatures it was very much soft spring snow by the afternoon.

Lunch was at the top of Tougnete, not sure how long these picnic tables have been at this spot but the look fairly new. The view across the Belleville valley is really good, I remember photographing this back in 1993 or thereabouts.

The cloud bank makes the orientation diagram a bit hopeless though.

Quite a few of these wooden heart shaped things are popping up. They have some sort of seat and we think the idea is you sit in them and have someone take your picture to put on Instagram…

In the afternoon we headed over to Saulire. Looked at the couloirs but decided to save that for another day!

The good news is the Saulire cable car is back in operation so we can go back to complaining there are too many people up here.