The Great Trek

We are based at Les Menuires which is in the one valley (along with Val Thorens) of the three valleys ski area, the other two valleys have the towns of Meribel and Courcheval in them respectively. Getting to Courcheval is more than a mornings skiing away so Caron kindly offered to collect the kids from ski school and to babysit them until we returned in the afternoon thus giving us enough time to get there and back.

We dropped the kids off at ski school, I skied down following Sage and Kim who are both doing well, and then set off. We had a few navigation mishaps which weren't so much from miss reading the map as not following the pistes correctly. It is not always such a clear cut thing here exactly which way a piste goes, they seem to diverge and join up or join up on another piste, it's all very confusing. We found ourselves at the top of 3 marches Saulire which only had a red run (alouette) going down from it into the Meribel valley so it was time to negotiate our first red which we accomplished with a reasonable degree of elegance. Fortunately, it wasn't so long before we joined up with a very long and boring blue (ours) all the way down to Meribel from where we caught the lift up to Sauire where our only choices of route were red or black - again. So red it was, we're starting to get the hang of them now. We finally got to Loze and could drop down into the Courcheval valley where we spent a couple of great hours repeatedly doing the pralong, biollay and petit lac runs. They were great fun and the pistes at courcheval are enormously wide and it is really difficult knowing where one piste ends and another starts with the result that I lost Kirsten and Carl temporarily. I caught sight of someone with a very similar jacket to Kisten whom I started following which just made matters worse. Somehow we managed to find each other and decided to start heading back. There are so many english people here that it sounds like London closed down and relocated to Courcheval.

We had lunch at the top of Coqs which is quite close to Loze and is the location of the great soup bomb. I don't quite know what happened but I ended up spilling soup all over myself, the tray and worst of all, the herring salad. In spite of the herring swimming in a sea of vegetable soup, it actually tasted fantastic. The soup wasn't bad either, at least what was left of it. Spent some time trying to desoup myself, I had to clean my salopettes, my jacket and my boots but in spite of this, this lunch will be remembered for the herring salad, and the soup bomb I guess.

The weather was turning miserable so we just headed home from then on and arrived home just after Caron, Kim and the kids returned home. The had spent the afternoon having a huge amount of fun building snow men and women.


We had just finished having a great meal of baked potato and beans and roast courgette with pesto and gruyere lovingly prepared by Kim when we heard a loud bang so we all rushed outside to see a fireworks display just over the roofs of the apartments next to us.

Somewhere, in the house there is another popping sound somewhere which I have barely to notice but is busy driving Kirsten demented. It's very funny but she doesn't find it anywhere near as humorous as I am. I think it may even become her enduring memory of Les Menuires.