Tuesday 8 Jan, 2008

A very unusual start to the day. Normally I am up first and Megan shortly thereafter but this morning Carl was the very first one up. Of course there was a reason, it was 08:00 which meant that Megan and I had overslept by 2 hours which meant that I slept for a whole 10 hours. Thank goodness for the skiing because otherwise I would be an insomniac and arrive back from holiday as sleep deprived as when I left.

The start of they day was a little rushed between getting kids ready, breakfast and the daily diary and backing up of photographs and GPS tracks but by the time the kids school started, we were all ready for a trip over to Switzerland with Kirsten, Carl and myself. I forgot to turn the GPS on so the track only starts at the top of Ripaille but the route there was Tour, Prolays, Mosette, Mosette Chairlift, Abricotine and an unnamed run down to the bottom of Ripaille.

The Ripaille runs were so enjoyable that we did them both several times and a couple of times we took video footage of us descending which is very revealing as to how well one ski's. From there we headed down to Les Crosets but stopped on the way there for some Vin Chaux, served by a very good looking waitress, and ended up talking to a couple from Strassburg which none of us even know in which country it is. They were very friendly and it was great chatting to them. They noticed that although we were speaking english, we didn't have the normal accent so they wanted to know where we were from.

We did the crosets red run which I went down way too fast, not quite out of control but damn close to it. From there it was up Mossettes and down Abricotine and back home for lunch. It was an absolutely fantastic day out with bright sunshine and quite good skiing albeit a little bit icy.

After lunch things got interesting because I decided to do the Marmotte field which is a blue mogul run. When I got to the top I had a choice of a red mogul run or a blue mogul run, almost all the people were doing the red one but since this would be my first mogul run, I took the blue. This was a big mistake as I very soon found out. At the altitude that the mogul run was there had been quite heavy snow and then with the rain there was a nice crust of ice on top which my weight was just able to break through so I was actually skiing just under the top crust of ice and if I put any more weight on the downhill ski in order to carve, the tip would simply go under the crust and sink which means that I was catapulted forward head first into the snow/ice. After the fifth dismount within about 200m I had had enough and I took the ski's off and trudged down to the red run and sulked while I got my humour back. After a while I put my ski's back on and coped reasonably well with the remainder of the red run. Depending on how I feel tomorrow, I might come back up and do the red run from the top. Maybe.

Headed over to join Kirsten, Carl and the slinky chain of two kids on super-morzine for a while before calling it a day. Carl saw a t-shirt which had an arrow pointing up and another pointing down, the one up was labelled “The Man” and the one down “The Legend” which led to all sorts of mirth after supper with Carl making a memorable comment about “Not wanting to blow my own ...” as his voice petered out when he realised what he was saying.



While I was taking this photo, I could hear the waitress behind me cackling with mirth at this tourist, I mean, taking a photograph of a t-shirt! Really!

No tobogganing tonight but we did pop out to get some crepes for pudding for the adults. The kids had been spoilt by Caron at lunch time with two crepes each. Lucky things.