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Here are some photos of my recent Skiing holiday in Puy St Vincent. We all met up in at London Waterloo International and took the Eurostar to Gare du Nord, Paris. Unfortunately, the Eurostar was 45 minutes late arriving in Paris and when combined with the RER (a Regional French train) having problems with its electricity supply, we managed to arrive at Gare de Lyon 7 minutes after our train had left. We found out that there was another train heading down in the direction of the Alps and hot-footed it across Paris to get on this. We made this train but had to buy new tickets for this and ended up standing / sitting in the corridors of an already full train. In the train that we'd missed, we had beds - thanks Eurostar! Also, Danny, Myk and Anthony were stranded in the next carriage, with the door between being locked!
After a total of three French trains (instead of the single sleeper train), we finally arrived at our destination and a 30 minute taxi journey later we were finally at our hotel in Puy St Vincent (1400m). It had taken Danny, Sam and myself 23 hours' travelling to get to Puy (from leaving for Southampton Central station - it should have taken about 17 hours), having had little or no sleep. Despite this, we hired our skis, bought our lift passes and headed out to the nursery slopes for about an hour before the lifts closed.
The Hotel St Roch was very pleasant. The staff were very friendly (some being very camera shy) and we all had a very pleasant stay. My apologies and thanks should really go to Edith for putting up with me practising my French (speaking that is!) with her in the last couple of days of the holiday - I hope that she didn't find it too tedious. The food was absolutely delicious with a wonderful variety of dishes throughout the week. Then there was the cheese-board (Sorry, I forgot to get a photo of it). The hotel is located next to a chair lift which takes you up the hill. The bottom of the lift can't be more than 15 meters from the boot room door at the back of the hotel (the attempted night photo of this didn't come out... just imagine a lift in the middle of the picture, chairs coming over your head and the hotel bar under the illuminated sign!).
We skied lots - well, we did go to do that! A whole load of snow fell whilst we were there and we enjoyed skiing some runs with up to about 12" of un-pisted snow (here). One lunchtime, we went to the Restaurant "La Goulue" up at the 1600 level and found a mad waiter called Mo (or is that Moe, like The Simpsons?). He was such a good laugh (and the food was good too) that we ended up going back there for lunch the next two days as well! I was on this holiday and did some skiing too (I'm suffering from "absent photographer syndrome" in these photos). We also visited the Alphand Brewery during the week. Here is a photo of the owner pulling a beer in the bar just after showing us around.
My vote for most improved skier goes to Anthony who hadn't really skied before this holiday and took on the hardest red run in the resort (which includes 100yds of black) on the last day of the holiday. Tom and Jamie were also very competent skiers by the time we put down our glasses of Jenlain (?sp) and departed for home. Janet wins the 'duracell' award for sking on and on and on and.... (you know the drill!)
Most amazing of all skiers who I met on the holiday was Linda. Linda is completely blind. She learnt to ski after she lost her sight. She skis with her guide Peter. It was lovely to see someone in Linda's position who was so positive about getting out and enjoying themselves. At supper one evening, Linda reported that she hadn't been skiing that day as the visibility was too poor! Of course, the visibility was too poor for Peter, but an excellent joke nonetheless.
Alas, the holiday was over. We travelled back on the couchette (a.k.a. "courgette") all the way to Paris without changing trains (have a look at our cabin). At Gare de Lyon (at some unearthly hour), someone noticed that I could have avoided getting off the RER at Gare du Nord and simply been home in "St Denis" (unfortunately not St Denys!) only two stops later - I got the Eurostar! Oh yes, Danny lost his wallet and so I got a photo of him and Sam scouring the small-print of their travel insurance to find out about their cover - to only find out (having also been skiing between Christmas and New Year) that someone had messed up when they renewed their travel insurance and that they weren't actually covered for skiing! Thank goodness nothing happened to them.
Same time next year?
All photos are 640x480 JPEG images (under 100K), unless otherwise indicated.
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