What I did on my Holidays, part 2
Apr. 4th, 2008 04:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenChamonix-Mont-Blanc
On Monday evening, I couldn't stay at the Eastercon, as the following afternoon I was flying out to la belle France. So I headed home at around last-Tube time. This proved something of an adventure. After spending £13 to get to Hatton Cross on Thursday, I thought better of it and spent a mere (hah!) £11 to go direct to the LUL station in the airport. To my pleased surprise, I was joined by a fellow fan at the next stop, a large ginger Scotsman called DC, who was leaving to stay with a friend in Battersea. We discussed cons and poly and programming and all sorts for much of the trip into London – a little bit of bonus con time. Interestingly, hardly any of the poly types I knew at the con attended the last-minute poly gathering they threw. I reckon there's a lot more of it about than is generally recognised, perhaps even in surveys by experts such as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
some_fox.
The train trip took rather longer than expected – I got a train to Hammersmith, then a train to Earl's Court which sat just outside it for 30min or more, then a 1am train down to Wimbledon, then a bus to Colliers' Wood. For once, I was glad of the delay – with my at-best erratic timesense dulled by a few ales, I was not fretting with impatience, and yet I still managed to train it to close to home.
And so to bed, via a brief (as in, one-hour) interlude of cat-stroking and a somewhat panicked hunt for my passport.
Up again 5h later and onto a bus to Croydon, to visitjamesb to grab Stef's old snowboard bindings off him. He very kindly gave me a lift to pingopark's, where she and reverendjim provided me with Meike's old snowboard, complete with bag, and Jim's old goggles. Thus burdened, I bussed it back home, added lostcarpark's old boots into the bundle, and hastily packed. I called a cab to East Croydon, wanting to waste no time, and while waiting for him to arrive, made some sandwiches for the journey.
Then things started to unravel a little. The cab got stuck in traffic, so I diverted to Mitcham Junction to get a tram instead. However, as I'd not planned this, I'd not bought that morning's Travelcard with me, so I had to pay again. And then the tram took ages and was thronged.
I got a train to Gatwick at 5, about the time I'd planned to arrive. I was getting slightly fretful messages from John enquiring as to my whereabouts.
And yet, when I got there, all was in good time. He'd told me to meet him a good 40min before we needed to, meaning that even though I was 15min late, we had some half an hour in hand. You can tell he's known me for some 20yr, can't you?
Checked in, went through security, pottered around the shops; by this time, I was starting to work out the things I'd forgotten in my super-quick packing. The snag being that I was still too frazzled and hungover from Easter to actually obtain replacements.
Next stop, Geneva. We arrived, met our taxi-bus driver – an amiable young Scot – and having time to spare, I went in search of cash.
At which point I discovered that my plain old non-debit card wouldn't work in any Swiss cash machines, which sent chills down my back. I no longer bother with getting currency in advance or anything – easier to use an ATM on arrival. However, since my last foreign trip, I've changed banks. Needless to say, I'd also forgotten to bring my stashes of Euros and Swiss Francs.
On arrival in Chamonix, I called our esteemed host, who arrived with a cheery greeting of "oh, so you managed to find the right place this time, did you?"
His flat is… remarkably compact and bijou. Working a season in a ski resort sounds great to me, but there are drawbacks. Iain gets free accommodation, a free lift pass, free kit hire and free courses – but as a result, makes so little actual pay that he never hits the UK basic tax threshold.
The free flat is tiny: a microkitchen perhaps twice the size of my old one in Du Cane Court (which no-one believed in until they saw it), complete with integrated cookerfridge. A modest if sunny bedsitting room with balcony. A narrow hallway with two bunk beds. A reasonable pine-walled bathroom. So John and I – both large chaps – were sleeping in the hall. I never normally unpack when staying for short times, but this time I had to – there was barely room to open my suitcase.
The Next Day
Happily, the French cash points would give me money. Which immediately was consumed by buying a lift pass – some €240. Then I went to the nearest snowboard rental place to enquire about fitting my – well, Stef's – Ride bindings to my (read, Meike's) Burton 'board.
No can do, they say. Burton use a 3-screw mounting; everyone else uses 4. The mounting discs won't fit.
So I have to rent a 'board, too. And a helmet. I figured gloves and wrist-braces would be cheap enough to buy.
Nuh-uh. For instance, it's the end of season sales. What this means in practice is, yes, half price or less kit, but very little in useful sizes: scads of tiny girly kit but sod-all in Liam-size XL.
We spend an (in my case, jelly-kneed) afternoon sight-seeing on the implausibly high Aiguille du Midi and an early evening hunting necessaries, not entirely successfully.
So on day 3, to John's mounting irritation, I'm still not ready for the off. Eventually I despatch him up the mountain while I dash around in search of wrist-guards and gloves large enough to actually fit while also costing less than £50. It's quite a hunt. Also, everyone tells me that they can't fit Ride bindings onto a Burton board, but maybe another shop can. Eventually, most of these tales converge on a place called "Xerogee" or "Xerologie" or something like that. However, I can't find it.
In one of those typical occurrences, the tiny location de ski right by the Brévent cablecar, at the top of a road so steep as to be near-lethal to someone dressed for Arctic conditions and carrying a large plank, has braces aplenty, as well as cheaper gloves and water than I've already bought. I'm beginning to regret the all-round impromptu nature of this trip now.
So I ascend the cablecar. Odd to reflect how back in 2001 or 2002, such trips terrified me spitless; now, I find them actually quite pleasant, perhaps because I know what pleasures await above.
The Brévent Green run is not a very beginner-friendly one. It is very short, accessible only by chairlift – a mode of transport not well-suited to novice snowboarders. You see, one must skate off the chair down a short slope, meaning that you move forwards away from the chair faster than it's moving along its cable.. The problem is, snowboards don't go forwards or backwards – they travel sideways. To re-ascend the green, you must take a button tow - even more boarder-hostile. First time, I just walked it. Once my pulse dropped below 300 and the pretty flashing lights disappeared again, I decided that maybe the tow lift wasn't such a bad thing after all. And indeed I managed it, after one fall and a submission (accompanied with more circling stars).
Oh, yes, and the end of the Green is marked by a steep drop-off where the run continues on to become a Blue.
So after a couple of goes, I did that.
And as you can see, I lived to tell the tale.
I could go on in such detailed vein, but I'm sure it would be fairly dull. I didn't push myself this trip – lots of lies-in, 2-3h a day on the pistes, sometimes more, sometimes less, and many leisurely evenings of beer and good food. Eventually I found "Xerogee". It's actually "Zero G", and they sorted my bindings out for me for €8. Bargain. Also had a decent-looking curry restaurant next door, of which more anon.
Chamonix is a very pleasant town. It's rather bigger than Val d'Isére or Les Deux Alpes, the only other Alpine resorts I really know. It feels a little more like a real town – there are day-to-day places like schools and pet shops and so on. It's not all perfect – the only good place for a beerhead is the MBC, the Micro-Brasserie du Chamonix, and while the beer was decent, it was full of families with small children and felt more like a family restaurant than a beer bar. Also, despite much searching, I was unable to find anywhere offering a vegetarian Raclette, a Savoyarde regional speciality of which I'm rather fond. But the food was good, if expensive; the beer was perfectly acceptable; I found a good quiet bar (called, improbably, Irish Coffee), a good noisy party bar (Chambre Neuf) and a good beer bar (MBC).
In a few visits to Chambre 9, John & I or Iain & I had fun with Scandinavians. First, J & I had an only slightly surreal chat with Nina, a gorgeous bubbly blonde who claimed to come from Bergen in Norway but didn’t seem to understand a word I said. (And I'm not that bad.) She sat on my lap while gazing into J's eyes telling him how gorgeous he was. I'd rather she'd been sitting on my lap telling me how gorgeous I was, but better that than sitting on John. A few days later, Iain & I encountered a mad Dane – he does a good job of describing that here. There was also a good curry, as he writes a day or so later.
Despair, Inc do a wonderful line of "Demotivators" posters. One of my personal favourites is Ineptitude.
I think this needs to be my motto when it comes to snowboarding. It's been three years now, days of expensive lessons, and I'm still utterly useless. At best, I can occasionally link a few turns, make it down a shallow bit of a Green.
Mostly, though, I'm rigid with terror, edge-slipping down every slope steep enough to make it viable, and almost every attempt to turn causes me to either face-plant or fall on my arse.
I don't really know exactly why. I can do it and I have. I can ride the front or rear edge, "carve" straight downhill (is that the right word?), turn and stop. I can turn from one edge onto the other and back again. I can side-slip forwards and backwards. I think the only key skill I can't do is standing up while facing downhill, and I think that's largely due to being a bit fat, a bit unfit and not very bendy. I'm quite handy at flipping myself over, though, and standing up facing uphill is no problem.
But time and again, I freeze up and can't do it.
Like on my penultimate day. John set off for a distant village, Le Tour. I followed a little later. There were two low-level Greens and a Blue, very short and shallow – more like nursery slopes. There were 3 tow lifts. There were also huge queues. Composed mostly of kiddies and mums.
Now, tow lifts make me fall over, and if I'm using them in the recommended, prescribed fashion, with only my front foot in, then if I fall, I can easily twist and hurt my buggered left leg. So I tried to get on with both feet in the bindings, over the lift-man's protests. The result? An initial jerk of such unexpected savagery that it felt like I described a brief somersault before I landed. "What happened?" demanded the lift attendant.
I tried again, after 15min of getting back in the queue. Same result. I was thrown unceremoniously off the lift, demoted to the smaller #2 lift, where I was bollocked for trying to go with both feet in my bindings.
I gave up. Sod it, I thought, this is not only hot and slow and painful, it's humiliating. So I took the cablecar up the mountain, resolving to try a Blue. I mean, I'd already done one this trip, on my first day out, as well!
Well, it was scary. High and desolate and windswept and cold. Magnificent. Terrifying.
So it was back to the old side-slip-all-the-way gig.
I've discovered that it's easier, on a steepish slope, to edge-slip backwards than it is to turn, so, at an appropriately glacial pace, I worked my way down the easiest Blue.
Until I was collared by one of the sweepers-up and told I had just 5min 'til the last cablecar went down. He watched me go for a few seconds, then told me to give him my 'board and walk it.
A very dispiriting end to the day, that.
Then came the last day.
Now, last time, in '06, the afternoon of the last day is when it all came together and I managed a high, steep and twisty Green all on my own.
This year proved similar.
Several possible reasons for this spring to mind. It could be that it's the desperation of knowing it's nearly all over. Or because after a week, I'm so shattered that it's hard to actually become tense or rigid. Or because I stop caring so much about losing the rest of the trip to a minor injury once I know there's no "rest of the trip" left.
This year, there was one major factor. John had planned to go sight-seeing, but when we got up on Monday, we discovered that it was overcast and rainy. I decided to go up the mountain anyway and he came too. As we rose up in the cablecar, the rain turned to soft fluffy snow, covering the pine forest in a blanket of white straight off a hundred Christmas cards. Quite beautiful.
Debarking at the top – I'd picked Flégere again for its choice of two reasonably-long Greens – we found that visibility was poor but doable. The pistes were more than half-empty and were a few inches deep in powdery fluff: the sort of thing that skiers disdain but that filled me with confidence. When it's all soft fluff underfoot, you know that falling over won't hurt so much, you see.
And after fighting down the initial steep and narrow bit, and wasting an hour or so working out what I was doing all over again, it all seemed to come together. My turns joined; my edge-riding was controlled and so was my braking. The very last part went fine. Emboldened, I went back up to the top.
Now, there's a snag at Flégere. The chairlift terminates on a small hill; the only way down to the cablecar and the start of the pistes is down a steep hill. Too steep to walk down and steeper than a deeply-timorous débutante snowboarder fancied doing. So I sat on my board and tobogganed, which is great fun. You can, with a little practice, even steer and brake, a bit.
Except that as my board and I gathered speed, we rolled over and board and I parted company. As I cartwheeled downslope on my back, the board set off without me. It shot down the hill, across the big open expanse at the foot in front of the cablecar station, watched with interest but no action whatsoever by half a dozen skiers, shot over the far edge and disappeared.
With panicked visions of spending £500-odd quid on a new board for Meike and new bindings for Stef, I stumbled to my feet and legged it downhill. A couple of teenagers on skis were looking over the edge with interest and told me as I approached that it was OK, it was right there.
And so it was. Lodged high on the wall beside the piste-basher garage, about 2m in the air.
After some acrobatics involving a found broken piste-marker, I retrieved it, with great gratitude.
Then it was time for some coffee and cake, then several hot chocolates, to bolster myself for one last run.
Which went fine. It was controlled and at times fairly quick, for me, which is to say anything above a brisk trot. I only fell over a moderate dozen or so times. I actually enjoyed myself.
And then it was all over. With the 20min return trip on the chairlift (and this time, I carefully picked my way down at the end), there was only 20min or so before the last cablecar down the mountain. I was out of time. "Game over, man! Game over!"
"Always leave 'em wanting more," that was what a mate of mine once told me. I always knew he'd never make it as an anaesthesiologist.
It was a great week. I'd been hoping all winter to squeeze in a trip before the end of the season. Finally, I had the time, I had the cash, I had a mate to come along with me and another mate to stay with. It's a great resort – more diverse and interesting than Val and with better bars, though nothing to equal Les 2 Alpes' Pub le Windsor. John and I had a great time, thanks tomadmosh_uk, and it was great to get to spend a bit of quality beer-drinking time with both of them for the first time in a couple of years.
But I really am wondering if I'm cut out for this snowboarding lark. Surely I ought to be making more progress by now?
I will try to squeeze in a few trips to XScape in Milton Keynes – I have friends nearby I could stay with – but it's going to take a lot more than that, I fear…
On Monday evening, I couldn't stay at the Eastercon, as the following afternoon I was flying out to la belle France. So I headed home at around last-Tube time. This proved something of an adventure. After spending £13 to get to Hatton Cross on Thursday, I thought better of it and spent a mere (hah!) £11 to go direct to the LUL station in the airport. To my pleased surprise, I was joined by a fellow fan at the next stop, a large ginger Scotsman called DC, who was leaving to stay with a friend in Battersea. We discussed cons and poly and programming and all sorts for much of the trip into London – a little bit of bonus con time. Interestingly, hardly any of the poly types I knew at the con attended the last-minute poly gathering they threw. I reckon there's a lot more of it about than is generally recognised, perhaps even in surveys by experts such as
some_fox.The train trip took rather longer than expected – I got a train to Hammersmith, then a train to Earl's Court which sat just outside it for 30min or more, then a 1am train down to Wimbledon, then a bus to Colliers' Wood. For once, I was glad of the delay – with my at-best erratic timesense dulled by a few ales, I was not fretting with impatience, and yet I still managed to train it to close to home.
And so to bed, via a brief (as in, one-hour) interlude of cat-stroking and a somewhat panicked hunt for my passport.
Up again 5h later and onto a bus to Croydon, to visit
jamesb to grab Stef's old snowboard bindings off him. He very kindly gave me a lift to pingopark's, where she and reverendjim provided me with Meike's old snowboard, complete with bag, and Jim's old goggles. Thus burdened, I bussed it back home, added lostcarpark's old boots into the bundle, and hastily packed. I called a cab to East Croydon, wanting to waste no time, and while waiting for him to arrive, made some sandwiches for the journey.Then things started to unravel a little. The cab got stuck in traffic, so I diverted to Mitcham Junction to get a tram instead. However, as I'd not planned this, I'd not bought that morning's Travelcard with me, so I had to pay again. And then the tram took ages and was thronged.
I got a train to Gatwick at 5, about the time I'd planned to arrive. I was getting slightly fretful messages from John enquiring as to my whereabouts.
And yet, when I got there, all was in good time. He'd told me to meet him a good 40min before we needed to, meaning that even though I was 15min late, we had some half an hour in hand. You can tell he's known me for some 20yr, can't you?
Checked in, went through security, pottered around the shops; by this time, I was starting to work out the things I'd forgotten in my super-quick packing. The snag being that I was still too frazzled and hungover from Easter to actually obtain replacements.
Next stop, Geneva. We arrived, met our taxi-bus driver – an amiable young Scot – and having time to spare, I went in search of cash.
At which point I discovered that my plain old non-debit card wouldn't work in any Swiss cash machines, which sent chills down my back. I no longer bother with getting currency in advance or anything – easier to use an ATM on arrival. However, since my last foreign trip, I've changed banks. Needless to say, I'd also forgotten to bring my stashes of Euros and Swiss Francs.
On arrival in Chamonix, I called our esteemed host, who arrived with a cheery greeting of "oh, so you managed to find the right place this time, did you?"
His flat is… remarkably compact and bijou. Working a season in a ski resort sounds great to me, but there are drawbacks. Iain gets free accommodation, a free lift pass, free kit hire and free courses – but as a result, makes so little actual pay that he never hits the UK basic tax threshold.
The free flat is tiny: a microkitchen perhaps twice the size of my old one in Du Cane Court (which no-one believed in until they saw it), complete with integrated cookerfridge. A modest if sunny bedsitting room with balcony. A narrow hallway with two bunk beds. A reasonable pine-walled bathroom. So John and I – both large chaps – were sleeping in the hall. I never normally unpack when staying for short times, but this time I had to – there was barely room to open my suitcase.
The Next Day
Happily, the French cash points would give me money. Which immediately was consumed by buying a lift pass – some €240. Then I went to the nearest snowboard rental place to enquire about fitting my – well, Stef's – Ride bindings to my (read, Meike's) Burton 'board.
No can do, they say. Burton use a 3-screw mounting; everyone else uses 4. The mounting discs won't fit.
So I have to rent a 'board, too. And a helmet. I figured gloves and wrist-braces would be cheap enough to buy.
Nuh-uh. For instance, it's the end of season sales. What this means in practice is, yes, half price or less kit, but very little in useful sizes: scads of tiny girly kit but sod-all in Liam-size XL.
We spend an (in my case, jelly-kneed) afternoon sight-seeing on the implausibly high Aiguille du Midi and an early evening hunting necessaries, not entirely successfully.
So on day 3, to John's mounting irritation, I'm still not ready for the off. Eventually I despatch him up the mountain while I dash around in search of wrist-guards and gloves large enough to actually fit while also costing less than £50. It's quite a hunt. Also, everyone tells me that they can't fit Ride bindings onto a Burton board, but maybe another shop can. Eventually, most of these tales converge on a place called "Xerogee" or "Xerologie" or something like that. However, I can't find it.
In one of those typical occurrences, the tiny location de ski right by the Brévent cablecar, at the top of a road so steep as to be near-lethal to someone dressed for Arctic conditions and carrying a large plank, has braces aplenty, as well as cheaper gloves and water than I've already bought. I'm beginning to regret the all-round impromptu nature of this trip now.
So I ascend the cablecar. Odd to reflect how back in 2001 or 2002, such trips terrified me spitless; now, I find them actually quite pleasant, perhaps because I know what pleasures await above.
The Brévent Green run is not a very beginner-friendly one. It is very short, accessible only by chairlift – a mode of transport not well-suited to novice snowboarders. You see, one must skate off the chair down a short slope, meaning that you move forwards away from the chair faster than it's moving along its cable.. The problem is, snowboards don't go forwards or backwards – they travel sideways. To re-ascend the green, you must take a button tow - even more boarder-hostile. First time, I just walked it. Once my pulse dropped below 300 and the pretty flashing lights disappeared again, I decided that maybe the tow lift wasn't such a bad thing after all. And indeed I managed it, after one fall and a submission (accompanied with more circling stars).
Oh, yes, and the end of the Green is marked by a steep drop-off where the run continues on to become a Blue.
So after a couple of goes, I did that.
And as you can see, I lived to tell the tale.
I could go on in such detailed vein, but I'm sure it would be fairly dull. I didn't push myself this trip – lots of lies-in, 2-3h a day on the pistes, sometimes more, sometimes less, and many leisurely evenings of beer and good food. Eventually I found "Xerogee". It's actually "Zero G", and they sorted my bindings out for me for €8. Bargain. Also had a decent-looking curry restaurant next door, of which more anon.
Chamonix is a very pleasant town. It's rather bigger than Val d'Isére or Les Deux Alpes, the only other Alpine resorts I really know. It feels a little more like a real town – there are day-to-day places like schools and pet shops and so on. It's not all perfect – the only good place for a beerhead is the MBC, the Micro-Brasserie du Chamonix, and while the beer was decent, it was full of families with small children and felt more like a family restaurant than a beer bar. Also, despite much searching, I was unable to find anywhere offering a vegetarian Raclette, a Savoyarde regional speciality of which I'm rather fond. But the food was good, if expensive; the beer was perfectly acceptable; I found a good quiet bar (called, improbably, Irish Coffee), a good noisy party bar (Chambre Neuf) and a good beer bar (MBC).
In a few visits to Chambre 9, John & I or Iain & I had fun with Scandinavians. First, J & I had an only slightly surreal chat with Nina, a gorgeous bubbly blonde who claimed to come from Bergen in Norway but didn’t seem to understand a word I said. (And I'm not that bad.) She sat on my lap while gazing into J's eyes telling him how gorgeous he was. I'd rather she'd been sitting on my lap telling me how gorgeous I was, but better that than sitting on John. A few days later, Iain & I encountered a mad Dane – he does a good job of describing that here. There was also a good curry, as he writes a day or so later.
Despair, Inc do a wonderful line of "Demotivators" posters. One of my personal favourites is Ineptitude.
I think this needs to be my motto when it comes to snowboarding. It's been three years now, days of expensive lessons, and I'm still utterly useless. At best, I can occasionally link a few turns, make it down a shallow bit of a Green.
Mostly, though, I'm rigid with terror, edge-slipping down every slope steep enough to make it viable, and almost every attempt to turn causes me to either face-plant or fall on my arse.
I don't really know exactly why. I can do it and I have. I can ride the front or rear edge, "carve" straight downhill (is that the right word?), turn and stop. I can turn from one edge onto the other and back again. I can side-slip forwards and backwards. I think the only key skill I can't do is standing up while facing downhill, and I think that's largely due to being a bit fat, a bit unfit and not very bendy. I'm quite handy at flipping myself over, though, and standing up facing uphill is no problem.
But time and again, I freeze up and can't do it.
Like on my penultimate day. John set off for a distant village, Le Tour. I followed a little later. There were two low-level Greens and a Blue, very short and shallow – more like nursery slopes. There were 3 tow lifts. There were also huge queues. Composed mostly of kiddies and mums.
Now, tow lifts make me fall over, and if I'm using them in the recommended, prescribed fashion, with only my front foot in, then if I fall, I can easily twist and hurt my buggered left leg. So I tried to get on with both feet in the bindings, over the lift-man's protests. The result? An initial jerk of such unexpected savagery that it felt like I described a brief somersault before I landed. "What happened?" demanded the lift attendant.
I tried again, after 15min of getting back in the queue. Same result. I was thrown unceremoniously off the lift, demoted to the smaller #2 lift, where I was bollocked for trying to go with both feet in my bindings.
I gave up. Sod it, I thought, this is not only hot and slow and painful, it's humiliating. So I took the cablecar up the mountain, resolving to try a Blue. I mean, I'd already done one this trip, on my first day out, as well!
Well, it was scary. High and desolate and windswept and cold. Magnificent. Terrifying.
So it was back to the old side-slip-all-the-way gig.
I've discovered that it's easier, on a steepish slope, to edge-slip backwards than it is to turn, so, at an appropriately glacial pace, I worked my way down the easiest Blue.
Until I was collared by one of the sweepers-up and told I had just 5min 'til the last cablecar went down. He watched me go for a few seconds, then told me to give him my 'board and walk it.
A very dispiriting end to the day, that.
Then came the last day.
Now, last time, in '06, the afternoon of the last day is when it all came together and I managed a high, steep and twisty Green all on my own.
This year proved similar.
Several possible reasons for this spring to mind. It could be that it's the desperation of knowing it's nearly all over. Or because after a week, I'm so shattered that it's hard to actually become tense or rigid. Or because I stop caring so much about losing the rest of the trip to a minor injury once I know there's no "rest of the trip" left.
This year, there was one major factor. John had planned to go sight-seeing, but when we got up on Monday, we discovered that it was overcast and rainy. I decided to go up the mountain anyway and he came too. As we rose up in the cablecar, the rain turned to soft fluffy snow, covering the pine forest in a blanket of white straight off a hundred Christmas cards. Quite beautiful.
Debarking at the top – I'd picked Flégere again for its choice of two reasonably-long Greens – we found that visibility was poor but doable. The pistes were more than half-empty and were a few inches deep in powdery fluff: the sort of thing that skiers disdain but that filled me with confidence. When it's all soft fluff underfoot, you know that falling over won't hurt so much, you see.
And after fighting down the initial steep and narrow bit, and wasting an hour or so working out what I was doing all over again, it all seemed to come together. My turns joined; my edge-riding was controlled and so was my braking. The very last part went fine. Emboldened, I went back up to the top.
Now, there's a snag at Flégere. The chairlift terminates on a small hill; the only way down to the cablecar and the start of the pistes is down a steep hill. Too steep to walk down and steeper than a deeply-timorous débutante snowboarder fancied doing. So I sat on my board and tobogganed, which is great fun. You can, with a little practice, even steer and brake, a bit.
Except that as my board and I gathered speed, we rolled over and board and I parted company. As I cartwheeled downslope on my back, the board set off without me. It shot down the hill, across the big open expanse at the foot in front of the cablecar station, watched with interest but no action whatsoever by half a dozen skiers, shot over the far edge and disappeared.
With panicked visions of spending £500-odd quid on a new board for Meike and new bindings for Stef, I stumbled to my feet and legged it downhill. A couple of teenagers on skis were looking over the edge with interest and told me as I approached that it was OK, it was right there.
And so it was. Lodged high on the wall beside the piste-basher garage, about 2m in the air.
After some acrobatics involving a found broken piste-marker, I retrieved it, with great gratitude.
Then it was time for some coffee and cake, then several hot chocolates, to bolster myself for one last run.
Which went fine. It was controlled and at times fairly quick, for me, which is to say anything above a brisk trot. I only fell over a moderate dozen or so times. I actually enjoyed myself.
And then it was all over. With the 20min return trip on the chairlift (and this time, I carefully picked my way down at the end), there was only 20min or so before the last cablecar down the mountain. I was out of time. "Game over, man! Game over!"
"Always leave 'em wanting more," that was what a mate of mine once told me. I always knew he'd never make it as an anaesthesiologist.
It was a great week. I'd been hoping all winter to squeeze in a trip before the end of the season. Finally, I had the time, I had the cash, I had a mate to come along with me and another mate to stay with. It's a great resort – more diverse and interesting than Val and with better bars, though nothing to equal Les 2 Alpes' Pub le Windsor. John and I had a great time, thanks to
madmosh_uk, and it was great to get to spend a bit of quality beer-drinking time with both of them for the first time in a couple of years.But I really am wondering if I'm cut out for this snowboarding lark. Surely I ought to be making more progress by now?
I will try to squeeze in a few trips to XScape in Milton Keynes – I have friends nearby I could stay with – but it's going to take a lot more than that, I fear…
