Skiing again

Not much of a view, March 2017

I've been on holiday and had the most wonderful time skiing in France. Each year I seem to enjoy skiing more, and this year I felt as though my technique had improved as well, which made it even more satisfying.

I wasn't going to ski this year what with the expense of the LTRP and all, but I booked a week off work anyway because annual leave must be taken or it's lost. Then the friends I went skiing with last year told me that they were going again and it happened to be the same week that I'd already booked as leave. So I didn't take much persuading.

Five of us travelled by train, one flew in. Four of the five who travelled by train did the travelling by day and staying in hotels overnight, but I thought I'd save the extra day of annual leave and took the overnight Eurostar both ways. Eurostar no longer run the proper sleeper trains, so it was ten hours sitting up in a chair, but a minute before departure I still had an empty seat next to me.

Unfortunately as we pulled out of St Pancras two mothers turned up, each with a child aged about three or four, and we all moved around to accommodate them. One child was drearily moaning (apparently she had a tummy ache) and the other was literally screaming (no idea why). I hoped that each would be tired out due to these exertions, and they did both sleep, but one of them woke up much too early and conversed with her mother in piercing tones which her mother did nothing to suppress. I didn't sleep much on that journey. I didn't sleep much on the way back either, and that time there were no children and I had nobody next to me, so I have to conclude that I'm just not particularly good at sleeping on trains.

No idea

Despite the sleep deprivation I managed nearly a full day of skiing on arrival, went to bed relatively early and was none the worse for it. The weather was quite sunny for a day and a half, and then it started to snow. Friends at a nearby resort fared worse when an avalanche closed all lifts and pistes for a whole day, but we skied on through heavy snow, low cloud and on one occasion wind stronger than I have ever experienced. One of the party commented very accurately that when we were inside the cloud it was like skiing inside a ping pong ball. I found it quite amusing to be unable to tell where the slope in front of me went; others were not so entertained. We headed back to the apartment a bit earlier that day. The last couple of days were rather hot and sunny, so we finished with long days of good skiing.

The apartment was in the same complex as last year but a bit smaller, so we were all sharing rooms. In the evenings we went out to eat a couple of times, or stayed in and watched a film. Lunches were either in piste restaurants or late lunch back at the apartment on the days when we came back early. I did a lot of lovely reading, and even lovelier lot of skiing. It was a great holiday which put me in quite a tetchy mood going back to work on Monday, and then through the course of Tuesday I developed a cold, perhaps derived from someone on the train or at work.

So now while snuffling and coughing and generally feeling full of cold I'm pondering how to do even more skiing next year. In the meantime I've restarted the ebay campaign with the next batch of historical postal ephemera, but this will never raise enough to fund snow-related activity! Also I've tried and failed to consider suitable lighting in the new kitchen, and played badminton and meditated as usual, albeit accompanied by much coughing and nose-blowing (not so much during the meditation). What I ought to do today is to research kitchen lighting, but it's not an attractive option.