Snow, Sun and Brandy for Breakfast

Welcome to my first ever Blog! And my first ski trip with the AOAC, although I am certainly not new to skiing. I just have never been moved to write about my skiing experiences before.

There are probably several reasons for this, firstly, when I started skiing blogs hadn’t been invented, (and I still had hair) or maybe I was to busy writing letters of complaint to travel companies, in particular Crystal holidays! But more than likely, I just couldn’t be assed.

So that’s the introduction over, on with the blog.

Well, it is always good to get a skiing holiday off to a jolly pleasant start, so on the Friday night I met up with Les, Gary and Karen at what is probably our favourite hostelry, The Somerset Wagon in Chilcompton, for some food and a drink or two/three. ‘Start as you mean to go on,’ as the old adage say’s. Well I am on holiday.

Despite a fairly lengthy wait for our food to arrive we had a most enjoyable meal, which was predictably followed by that typically girlie thing where they say “Oh, I’m to full for a dessert, but if you want one I’ll just have a bit if yours!!.” Sod off I thought, if you want some dessert, bloody well get your own.

Well a compromise was reached and 2 desserts were ordered, one for me and one to be shared by the others. Needless to say Les’s spoon spent most of its time helping itself to my cheesecake rather than the communal one!!

After that, it was back to Karen’s where we were all crashing for the night for a full night’s sleep of nearly three and a half hours.

We now move on to stupid o’clock (4.30 am) on Saturday morning, at Bristol Airport where we meet up with the rest of the intrepid skiers from the AOAC. Having checked in bags and skis, it was off to departures security check for the first amusing incident of the day.

Gary had unwittingly left his full hip flask in his hand luggage! So, with his hip flask not being a clear container with more than 100ml of liquid he had a choice. Now, even the most liver damaged hardened drinkers out there would surely baulk at the thought of downing half a pint of neat brandy in one at 5 am in the morning, especially before breakfast. But not Gary, he did what any self respecting p**shead would do. Just kidding, he poured it away, what a waste. You would have thought that with all the other drinks that had been confiscated there would have been some coke he could have mixed it with to make it more palatable at that time in the morning.

Now there’s a business opportunity, a chain of Airport Security Cocktail Bars stocked with confiscated booze and mixers, serving drinks to passengers as they wait to put their coats and loose change in the plastic trays and to take their shoes off. See you all on The Dragon’s Den!!

Things pass pretty well uneventfully as we board the plain and fly off to Grenoble, but hey, what’s this! Snow at the airport, in all my years of skiing, and that’s quite a few I have never seen snow at the airport. Not exactly deep and crisp and even, but snow is snow and we are going skiing, so things are looking good. (Just like me in my hat)

We now pass through an interesting piece of airport architecture, commonly called a marquee and are greeted by the ‘cheerful’ French immigration officer. I shouldn’t think this guy has smiled since he found out Father Christmas wasn’t real. Miserable git. Leaving Monsieur ‘Appee behind we head off for the baggage reclaim and just so we know we are in France the carousel starts, no bags come out and it stops again. How many more times will it do this, well surprisingly just this once?

So now safely reunited with our luggage we board the coach and head off for Les Deux Alpes.

As we travel along the snow covered countryside and make our way up to the resort, the rep briefly gives us some relevant details about Les Deux Alpes, and then spends a considerable time trying to persuade us to part with more money for the bar crawl, an overpriced trip to Serre Chevalier and phone cards.

At about 12.30 pm French time we arrive at the Hotel La Belle Etoile (More about the hotel later)! With most of the group crammed into the reception area and a good few of us left outside we spend about 20 mins listening to even more details whilst several of us crossed our legs and prayed our bladders wouldn’t burst. Eventually some rooms are made available and we are able to relieve ourselves and get ready to go skiing.

Just over an hour from arriving in the resort a large group of us are ready to hit the slopes for a bonus afternoon’s skiing, and we make the allegedly only ‘400 metre’ walk to the lift pass office at the Jandri Express gondola. Do me a favour! If that walk is only 400 metres then I will eat my black hat. Why the reps couldn’t have told us it was easier, as we discovered later, to the walk 200 metres to a free drag lift and then ski down to the lift pass office will remain a mystery.

Anyway, just after 2 pm we depart the gondola at mid station and put on our skis for the first time. The sun is shining, the snow feels good but that wind is a bit on the chuffin’ chilly side. Undeterred we set off en masse for our first run and it feels great. At the bottom of the run we all jump on the chair lift and head back up again. As we gain height the cold stiff breeze turns into an icy blast, jackets are zipped right up, hats are pulled down and some mild whinging starts, the first doubts about skiing being fun begin to enter people’s minds.

After a couple of hours of this, the thrill of skiing down the slopes and the misery of the lifts going back up again, our large group has fragmented into two smaller ones. One group keen to squeeze every last second out of their half day lift pass carry on bravely. The others decide we are cold and are in need of a drink and food. A suitable refuge is found and its hot chocolates or vin chaud and croque monsieurs all round.

Suitably refreshed the general consensus is to call it a day and head back to the hotel for a hot bath and a proper drink. I am still not sure what happened next to the group. It was decided to take the black run, Valatin back down to the resort. I pointed out that in order to avoid the long walk back to the hotel it would be necessary to branch off, before you get to the bottom, on a green run which traverses the nursery slopes and brings you to the Diable gondola near the hotel. This I duly did but to my surprise I found that only Les had actually followed me.

Where everyone else was I do not know. But we weren’t going to worry about it, and we headed back to the hotel, so ending our first days skiing – To be continued.