Not the words you want to hear from your skiing partner as you put your skis back on… but more of that later.

The forecast for today was not so good, risk of snow showers, but it started well enough.

We’d had a good discussion with the guy in ski rental shop last night, he was old enough to understand what kind of skis we learned on and why we might want something at the stiffer end of modern skis. He knew his stuff because the pairs he picked out are awesome, stable and with just the right amount of carving power.

I had wondered how much skiing ability we would have lost on our 5 year gap but it seems surprisingly little. We felt immediately at home on the hard snow that had frozen overnight… I was just thinking how well it was going when I suddenly realised I had no skis on anymore… the first thing to hit to snow at considerable speed was my nose followed by my helmet visor. This will reduce the cost per crash of the helmet I thought as I slid face first down the mountain….. I have no idea what happened, I probably crossed a ski but whatever caused it my nose appeared to hit the inside of my visor so hard that it took a lump of skin out of the bridge. A few tissues and some bad language later we were off again and I’m sure a pichet of the local painkiller will go down well later. The helmet is fine.

We were thinking what an imaginative fence this was…. Made up of vintage skis and photographed in one of the ever-shorter sunny intervals. Of course, I can remember skiing on a good number of those models of ski and we have a few of them in the garage. Never thought of making a fence out of them!

The weather got truly horrid in the afternoon, I guess this is a risk with a resort so high but you literally could not see from one piste marker to the next, you just guess and hope another pole of the correct colour appears. We could hear the distant sound of this cafe long before we could see it. We waited for a relatively clear spell with some coffee before heading down, deciding that there was no need to reduce the cost per crash further, and an early stop would be wise as the forecast for the next two days is good. Of course, the sun comes out the instant we reach the apartment, but there were still plenty of clouds so we stuck to the plan and sat on the balcony with a cup of coffee.

When they said this was centrally located, they weren’t kidding.

Can you believe it is 5 years since we last went skiing…. I’ll see how my legs feel tomorrow and then I’ll tell you if I can believe it. Terrifyingly it is also 25 years since we last went skiing without our children and 35 since we first went….

No more direct Eurostar service, no more Ashford departure point but we wanted to go by train..

First we get a GWR train to Paddington… then we have to fight our way with luggage across the London underground. We’ve always said this would be a bad idea and we are right…. how any disabled people cope with the impossible to find and wholly inadequate lifts is beyond me. Stay in a Premier Inn for the night after a wildly overpriced haddock and chips…

Next we get up at 4AM to check in t Eurostar, painless as anything can be at that time in the morning but then we have to fight our way across Paris…
This is also a bad idea, but not quite a bad as the London one and would be easier without the industrial action, protests and a rugby match thrown in but we make it to a TGV…

And manage to achieve a lifelong ambition of sitting upstairs! The views are much better and I had forgotten just how good they are doing this by train.

So we arrive at Moutier on time…. and then the fun starts. So we are booked on the 16:10 bus but as we are on time the 15:30 bus has not gone yet so we ask if there are spare seats…. well maybe…. until it turns out there are not even enough for the people with a 15:30 booking… oooh this could get interesting. A few of the people with 15:30 tickets are put on a Les Menuire bus, still a few left some getting a little tense… then someone appears shouting “anyone for Val Thorens?” We get herded to another coach, which I think had just appeared from Geneva. They let us on that one for some reason and we left on who knows what coach, that left a bit before the one we had booked! Hopefully the 16:10 is not still waiting for us.

Made it to Val Thoren’s in one piece. The place is a complete maze and it turns out the wheels on our bags don’t go so well on snow but we made it.

Really? A bit of light mizzle was falling when we headed out, so we decided to head for La Tania (I wonder if the cool people call it ‘Ta’) as it has some reasonable red runs above the resort in the trees. That worked well and by then the cloud had started to lift so we headed over to Courch for yet another run in the family park…. Some of the jumps were closed as they were stretchering a child off. (Am I the only one seeing a pattern here?)

We should talk about the snow at this point. When we arrived they were reporting over a metre at the resort and 3m at the top, levels I don’t recall seeing before. For the first 4 days the snow was to all intents and purposes perfect, even those horrid last 200m down into the resorts had good snow depth. It was a touch icy and in need of a good bashing by the end of the day but otherwise perfect. Then it rained on and off for about 36 hours…. and the snow seems to have survived much better than I would have expected. Resort level is slushy on top but there is a still a good hard base underneath. We saw one or two brown spots in La Tania but nothing really. When it freezes again it will be very icy until it gets some fresh snow on top. Above 2500m the snow is perfect, it’s had about 30cm extra during the week. Even that horrible stony wind swept bit off the top of Saulire is good snow.

Anyway we ate our sandwiches in the same place as before in Courch and found a new trick, send a hungry teenager to the nearest “snack” to get some chips to supplement them, assuming you don’t mind paying €14 for two bowls of chips of course….

We spent the afternoon on the red runs of Saulire, basically skiing between layers of cloud, with fluffy snow at the top and slushy snow at the bottom. Nearly sunny at one point.

On the way back we stopped off at “La Piste de Inuite” where they have all kinds of activities. The “feed your most annoying child to a husky” (I think I am translating that right) event seem to have been cancelled but there was a guy doing some Ice Carving.

All in ll slightly frustrating weather, but we got lucky chasing what bright and dry conditions there were and had a great day to end the week.

First a couple of videos from yesterday.

This is me following a Parrot down part of BK park…

Then we have a clip from Ecrueil, the black run off the top of Tougnete

As ever the video does not do justice to either the 50Km/h speed or how steep it is.

That was the last of the sun we would see for a while. Thursday started out with the 0C isotherm at over 2500m, and the cloud base down at about 2000m. This gives a simple choice, ski below the cloud in the rain (which is not nice) or ski up in the cloud in the snow (which is er.. not nice). One interesting spot in the morning was someone with even more retro gear than us.

That is actually tweed…

After a couple of hours we decided to retreat for a long lunch in the apartment. Most of my ski gear is from the technological dark ages before social media bots decided elections and we could still fly supersonic across the Atlantic,  but even 20 year old Gortex XCR does an incredible job of keeping the water the right side of the material.

We ventured out again in the afternoon, there were layers of cloud so you ski from snow, down into reasonable visibility, then into rain.

The snow conditions underfoot are incredibly variable, from powder to slush, I don’t want to think what it will be like when it freezes.

This evening we had the madness of the floodlit sledging. We have a lot of video, here are a couple of samples.

 

The forecast promised sunny intervals but in fact we had pretty much full sun all day. There were a few wisps of cloud first thing, which created an effect not entirely unlike being inside one of those snow globe things. I tried to photograph it but failed. You might just be able to make it out from this one.

We headed over to La Masse for the morning, it was a relatively balmy -7C by the time we got there, with some stunning views from the top. I thought people were taking the onesie thing a bit far until I realised this was a carving.

Another interesting lunch stop. This one had classic brutal Les Menuires architecture looks on the outside..

But inside it was heated, with nice tables and chairs, drinking water, microwaves and even a coffee machine.

For the afternoon we headed over to BK Park and dropped in for a few runs. After our first run through the jumps (not as well constructed as last year) they closed them while the helicoptered an injured child out. For some reason this rather dented our enthusiasm to go round again.

A nice ski down to St Martin de Belleville,

this was a tiny village when we first visited years ago that seems to be growing quite a bit, and the lifts on the way up had queues of about 10 minutes or so. As it is Valentine’s day someone decided handing out some free alcohol would help?

This evening was the torchlit descent and ski instructors show. Now these are usually pretty random and chaotic events, but the floodlighting failed not long into this one which added a whole new twist. Imagine if you will a commentator trying to explain what some ski instructors are doing, formation skiing in the dark. Someone had the sense to set off the fireworks and we all went to the bar a few minutes early.

I have some videos from today, but I don’t have time to post them this evening. Here is a picture of a Marmot in the meantime.

 

Today dawned bright and sunny as forecast, and -12C at base of the lifts… that’ll be cold then. We decided to head over to Val Thorens VT but ‘dropped in to area 43’ to get some air first (I think that is how you say it to sound cool… might need a hashtag in there, not sure).

Even better than sunshine was the distinct lack of wind, so we were able to get up high, and get views like this.

As you can see a distinct lack of crowds at altitude, but the lift were busy lower down.

As today is carnival apparently, struggling to see what that has got to do with pancakes but whatever… There is some deal that if you ski in fancy dress you get a free sledging pass on Thursday evening, or something like that. Anyway, Ruth and I decided to dress up as retro 1990s skiers, by the simple method of wearing our normal gear, but our skiing companions joined a lot of other people by skiing in onesies..

The good news is that the ‘self’ is alive and well in VT although this one has the disadvantage of being at 3000m, there are plenty of others.

We are really getting into this take a picnic idea, and VT has a few places marked on the map. Here is today’s, a cracking location, but it is still about -10C so eating with gloves on. Tried to sort the gopro on my helmet out for the afternoon but my hands were just too cold.

We dropped in (or is that hashtag dropped in, I’m getting confused) for a few runs in the family park, there are some serious jumps near here as well, we saw the helicopter pick up 2 stretchers while were in the area…

Time to head home after the inevitable stop… must be 25 years since we first had one of these.

Trying to cook pancakes this evening (not in onesies) which at least avoids any re run of the embarrassing moment two evenings ago when I mistook the tart aux framboise for a cork mat….

The good news was that the snow that had made for a rather irritating end of the day yesterday had carried on overnight and had given us a nice 20cm of fresh snow. The bad news was that it was still snowing, giving us a complete white out at the top of the first lift. We stayed in the trees around altiport for a bit until the weather improved and we headed over to Courcheval  Courch for lunch. We had brought sandwiches and found a really nice indoor picnic area to eat it. You need to be careful which door you enter by though….

Of course that would not pose a problem for these guys seem to be making a good living cleaning the tables of crumbs from the outdoor area.

In the afternoon the sun finally came out so we headed to the family fun park (I think the correct term is we ‘dropped in’)

The we headed over to 1650 in some seriously nice weather….

You’ll notice the lack of people… in general it has not been very crowded at all. This may be partly because not all UK schools are on holiday and apparently it is only the start of the French school holidays season, but it may also be because you have to be barking mad to be out in the conditions between these sunny intervals.

The cloud socked in big time so we headed home and discovered that everybody who was skiing was trying to do it in the same cloud we were. Came across a lad who must have been about 10, carefully working his way down the slope in full  control. When he caught up with his mother she shouted at him “Daniel can we stop hanging around and ski down really fast, I’m really scared up here”. Nice to see the brits out giving a masterclass in responsible parenting…. We made it home in the end through white out and invisible lumps of snow to try and rip your skis off, for the sun to come out just as we made it to the apartment…

Felt we  had deserved a trip to my favourite Mottaret restaurant which serves the best tartiflette in the alps (trust me I have researched this). They only have 5 tables to you need to book.

There was floodlit sledging this evening… we passed.

Hoping that tomorrow brings more of this….

Possibly without the thumb in the way.

 

Well the weather forecast was completely useless… well to be fair it was accurate for about an hour. Cloudy and cold but no snow.

Sadly for the rest of the day it was snowing so we stayed below the treeline when we could. It was also much warmer than predicted, but that is a good thing.

Lunchtime was spent bemoaning the lack of the self. It seems that pretty much throughout Meribel and Courchevel now you have a choice of a hotdog in a deckchair or a relatively expensive restaurant lunch. There used to be 3 or 4 reasonable self service places. Tommorrow we’ll take lunch with us.

The end of the day was a complete white out. We spent 45 minutes trying to work out which way was down on ‘one last run’ to arrive in Mottaret from the right direction and avoid a 3 minute walk….

I wonder if that forecast will be even remotely correct….

An uneventful trip on the Eurostar. The last part of the journey is always a bit stop start and one of the stops was handily by this waterfall.

Not sure we have ever seen snow this deep. The forecast looks a touch cold though.

Just got to battle with the bizarre French appartmnet bedding and then we can get some sleep…..

So we mentioned weather forecasts earlier. The forecast has been consistently predicting that the Mistral wind would blow today, in fact it came in early giving us a very windy night. This was the reason we were in the marina in Porquerolles not on our original plan of anchoring near the neighbouring island of Port Crow.

We had about 12 miles to cover to get the boat back to Port Pin Roland, the wind was blowing over 30 knots exactly from that direction. Opinions vary as to the exact wind speed, I saw 40 knots on the instruments at one point, but there were a couple of other things to focus on…

We motored into big sea, the mistral has over 100 miles of sea to pick up the waves and the island is in the full force of it. This makes it all rather uncomfortable as the boat slams into the waves. The odd thing is, we took various pictures and videos but none give any real impression of it. So here is a nice spray picture by Anya who has joined us for the last two days.

Once the coast allowed us to turn off the wind we got some sails up and speeded up. The engine that can push us at 6 knots on flat water struggles to get over 3 knots against the wind and sea but half our genoa can take that up to 6. We were never going to go anywhere near as fast as this guy through.

By the time these pictures were taken we were in the entrance to the harbour so the sea had flattened out but you can see the wind on the sea… but still this picture does not seem to convey its force.

That yacht was tacking upwind to the place we were motoring to and effectively keeping pace so we had to give way to him every time he tacked and came across us.

Anyway, we made it in and had dinner in a restaurant on the beach, while the wind whistled past outside.

… although you can’t see it in the picture….