Anyone for Tea?

Das Photo du Ski

OK, the photos are now all up on my photo site - but here's one to wet your appetite:



That particular shot was taken from the top of the 'Glacier De La Chiaupe' in the La Plagne ski area, which we skiied over to on Friday. Most of the week before that had been spent in the areas of Les Arcs and Peisey Vallandry making up an area of skiing which was really pretty impressive in it's magnitude. The only annoying thing being that as lifts generally started closing at about half-four in the afternoon there was a certain limit on how far you could get in a day.

Our chalet was in La Villaret, which was a little village which seemed pretty dominated by skiers - at least I didn't notice that many people who looked like locals! On the other hand, we only really saw the chalet in the mornings and the evenings, pretty much all of the rest of the time was spent up the mountain skiing or eating out. The guys running the chalet were great, especially when you consider the constant production line of cakes and 3-course haute-cuisine meals in the evening. They also were generally quite willing to offer guests a lift down to the 'lobster pots' (the antiquated, but functional cage-lift up from La Villaret/Peisey into Plan-Peisey where the ski lifts started...)

Actually, that was the biggest thing I noticed, having only been once before (to Bettmeralp) I wasn't really used to not being able to stumble out of my door at pretty much any hour of the day and have a chair-lift ready and waiting to take me up to the pristine slopes. On the other hand, the range and quality of runs at Les Arcs seriously dwarfed it's swiss cousin - albeit with the occasional point where someone had just forgotten to put any piste markers in!

It was also brilliant to get to know a new group of guys from church, and having Brad and Emtia around to help me interpret the complicated piste markings was invaluable. All in all, I think everyone enjoyed themselves - although it was fairly clear that you really needed to be able to ski well in order to get the most out of the region: public-transport and runs sometimes not quite linking up - so that the non-skiiers and those who could do only snowplough in our group ended up very limited in the runs they could gain access to.

On my part, it was also really useful to have some ski lessons to try and actually get proficient at skiing - to the point at which I wasn't too scared when the piste got a bit icy later in the week, and was able to take on a few red-runs! (which - to be fair - in P-V were often easier than the blues!). A couple of lessons from the English ski school out there made all the difference...

Anyway, I could go on and on - about how I somehow contrived to lose at Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary - and about the Pictionary rematch that we stole at the death with some inspired visual guesswork, or about the amount of alcohol consumed was possibly a little bit too much for us not to have a "not an official Every Nation Church activity" on the flyers next time - but I think I'd probably either bore you, or never get to go home today - or (more likely) just get no work done at all today. So I'll leave it there...

posted by RichB @ Monday, February 07, 2005