Skiing in the Alps

Our family above the Alps!!!!

Here in the UK we get a holiday called something like "mid winter break", which is not to be confused with the 2 week break in April. Gotta love that English schedule! anyway, we chose to go skiing in the Alps again this year, but in Les Arc, France in the Savoie region. wow. what a cute village and fun skiing. Three other families we knew were there at the same time, so the kids had a great time hanging out with friends. Les Arc has 4 different villages, all at different elevations. We stayed at the newest one called 1950 (as in 1950 meters). The village just above us at 2000 was part of the Albertville Olympics of 1992. It looked like a quickly built, Olympic dorm type place. Ours was more of a cute village - almost Disneyesque. Literally Ski in, ski out. perfect! The village has a ski run right through the town, no streets for cars or vehicles, only walking and skiing. B and Dad skiing through the village.The village is more like a little town built where there would normally be restaurant/lodge at the top of a mountain.

One run, Robert Blanc, was where the Olympic event took place. I, of course, never did that run myself, but my friend did. She said it was lots of fun. Entirely too steep for me.

The snow was powder all the time - all because it snowed almost 24/7 until our last day when the sun came out. In fact, one day the mountain was closed because of high winds. We took the opportunity to go sledding and also to look through the shops, but with stuff priced at 900 euro for jackets, etc, we didnt make ANY purchases other than our food and spent most of our free day sledding. They dont really sell any souvenirs anyway. A handful of postcards and about 3 magnets in the whole village. No shirts, fleeces or anything with Les Arc on it. Very different from other resorts we have been to.

L's sledding run. Notice the bus on the road at the end of the run!!! I would have NEVER let him do this, but as you can guess, dad did! DA insists that he stopped before the road.

B on the green sled. "Look out below!" I think she was on track to take out the photographer.

Gotta love that powder skiing though. DA got his kicks from skiing off piste into all the powder. It seemed that powder made a run out of everything, very few groomed pistes to follow.

The 3 shots above of DA going through the powder...and this is the result- ending upside down in the snow.
Me in my one moment of decent form. Had to post it for posterity sake.
L decided this was his "perfect form" shot, HA, except he's standing still!

The ski school there was so inexpensive that it seemed like everyone on the mountain took lessons. 6 half -days for 160 euro. I think that is about what 1 hour costs in Colorado.
B (on the left) and her friend going out to their lesson.

Les Arc is within view of Mont Blanc. We never got a great view of it though because even on our sunny day, it was covered in clouds!!! much to my frustration.

Mont Blanc is just over DA's shoulder, covered in a cloud.

DA and I took the gondola all the way to the top on the one sunny day to get some shots of the Alps. It was gorgeous. Some of these shots are looking out over the Italian part of the Alps. I didnt ski down from the tip top because they were all black runs from the top, and it was bitterly cold, colder than -20 C. I had frost bite on my feet by the time we got back down. I could hardly ski! We took the photos from the very top. You can barely see the top of the gondola lines, but that is where we were- at the top of that mountain.






Italy over my shoulder. I was so cold here. I smiled quickly and pulled the cover back over my face.




These 2 shots above show how much snow we had. These are the ski runs (piste). You can make out one of the lifts at the bottom of the photo.

One highlight of the trip was a dog sled ride. that was lots of fun. B was in love with those dogs! I think she would have done that everyday if it had been an option. Eight Siberian huskies pulled us through the snow. With all of the powder, we ended up looking like this!We are in the sled with our musher on back. We took turns so that we all got to stand. The dogs spoke French though, so we never gave the commands.

L helping get the dogs harnessed.

Her favorite dog, Echo. This photo shows when B and I were standing on the back. Notice how the dogs are looking toward the camera. The musher took this photo and they watched him whereever he went. I asked how he held their attention. The answer?? good food.

Since we were in France, you would normally expect the food to be fabulous. Well, for the most part it was, but I think lots of English people ski at this resort, so some of the food was a little geared towards them. One Mexican restaurant we went too was "curry everything". DA and I ordered beef fajitas and they came with curry rice, curry meat, NO Tortillas. That is NOT a fajita! The fondue place was really good except we had no idea about what we were ordering. We just ordered for the table and were going to share between us all. We ended up with this hot stone on which to cook our own beef and chicken (very tasty) and a huge chunk of cheese where they plugged in a heat lamp and as the cheese melted you scraped it off onto your plate, it was yummy. Somehow we ended up with 3 different types of potatoes at that meal. It was a carb fest. The tartiflette potatoes were so good - a local specialty to the Savoie region. Another restaurant was cooking tartiflette outside in a monster pan. Smelled so good as you skied by.

Another night, we went to a French Brasserie and I was enquiring about the fresh seafood laid out in the window. I only wanted some shrimp. I ended up not ordering the seafood because there were only 2 shrimp per a plate along with other things I wasn't interested in, namely raw oysters and welks and winkles. I didnt want to pay that much for 2 shrimp. The server thought I should try them anyway, and she brought me a complimentary plate with some of the choices. Much to DA's surprise, I actually ate the welks and winkles (I think these are Englishs words for escargot) and loved it. So good. No butter sauce though. More of a mayo dipping sauce. I deliberately did not think about the snails who eat up all my flowers at the house. The little ones (welks) look like the ones you see on the street after it rains, tiny little snails about the size of a nickel. My friend took a photo of the plate as evidence of my gastronomy adventure, I will post it when I get it from her.

No one got hurt on the trip and smiles were all around. Our one major bummer was that on the last evening when we went to return the kids' rentals and clean out our ski locker, we realized that our locker had been broken into and DA's boots had been stolen. He had been commenting all week on how happy he was with his boots and what great boots they were, then for them to get stolen. ugh. what a bummer. The hotel called today and said they found some locks inside a chimney and that the police were working on it. We have travel insurance, so I think we will somehow be able to replace the boots, but he is just disappointed because he liked THOSE boots. Regardless of the boot theft, we had a really fun time.

I wished several times during the week that my extended family could be there since we have always had so much fun skiing together. I could see them in my mind having fun around the slopes. Kept wondering who was going to be "sweeper" as the dads skied past me, but I knew my dad would get frustrated with some of the slow lifts. check out this lift line though. Cant beat that!

One funny effect of skiing in France is that we couldnt pronounce any of the runs or lift names. Made it very difficult to meet up with people. We couldn't match up their pronounciation with the written words on our maps, nor could we ask for help because we couldnt remember the pitiful pronounciation of the place we were hunting for. We BUTCHERED the French language. Best to stick together rather than have to meet up.