Me and Jessica have spent the last week or so at 1800m above sea level in France, as we were lucky enough to be invited on a skiing holiday with friends from work. We went to the resort of La Plagne and stayed in one of the SkiBeat chalets there. The chalet was lovely with great meals cooked every night by our chalet hosts. Generally we were too tired after a hard days skiing to do anything but sleep after we had been fed. Perhaps the lack of late nights was one of the factors that led to none of the eleven people in the group seriously injuring themselves.
The views from the chalet and piste were fantastic and I’ll put some photos in the gallery soon in case you don’t believe me. We could see Mont Blanc across the valley and I was amazed by the size of the resort which butted up against other resorts on most sides. Thankfully the altitude didn’t affect us in any noticeable way and we got used to the occasional ‘ear-pop’ on some of the long chair lifts.
The chair lifts were interesting…. on day one our instructor took us on without skis but on subsequent days we were able to do things properly. Our first attempt saw those on the lift fall over each other as they left the chair but we gradually got better at it. The worst lift experience I had was when one of my skiis decided to stay at the bottom of the lift and was carried up by the next passenger – skiing off the chair on one ski was challenging.
Our ski instructor (Valerie) took us through the basics and on day two we were going down red runs! Actually we were never supposed to go beyond blue runs but the thought of getting the bus back down the hill led to me, Jessica and Duncan sliding down a red run after our second day of lessons. After three days we were able to tackle most of the blue runs and our confidence improved until we could do them all.
It was amazing how everyone went from being unstable and falling to successfully navigating blue runs in just three days. I really enjoyed myself and I’d like to extend a big thank you to Chris for organising the trip.
I took the video below on my third day – it is on a green run which explains the lack of speed.