Quick link to Winter 2004/5 report: [1]
[2] [3]
[4] [5]
[6] [7]
18 December 2004
WEEKS 1 & 2
SNOW AND CHALET REPORT
Tignes
The guys have been here for a couple of
weeks and now they're settled right in. Despite the
poor early snow conditions, everyone has been riding
most days. As this is being written, however, it is
dumping down outside.(photo1&2)
Living in Tignes are Lucinda, Amelia, Rich, Big Pete,
Shorter Pete, Ray, Damian, Scott and soon to arrive
Kirsty. All ages, all sexes and all snowboarders...well
all bar shorter pete. All are well into tinkering with
their parts in a bid to save valuable tenths out on
the mountain. Most mornings are a two hour affair while
hair is styled, eyebrows are plucked, and a number of
jacket and pant ensembles tried out to achieve optimum
chic. Watching movies is a pure pleasure and our lounge
window is currently doubling up as a full size cinema
screen. We may be opening a small cinema cafe in the
near future.(photo3)
Big Pete and Rich drove out together and are the youngsters
of the chalet. They have opened their own private snowboard
school already, specialising in teaching slim, young
blond girls how to ride. Rich has been practising his
chat up lines in his sleep and Pete was so blown away
by them yesterday, they broke the bottom bunk!!!
We haven't seen Lucinda for a couple of days...her
boyfriend's in town so why would we!!!
Damian, or Robocop as he is quickly becoming known,
due to his abundance of body armour and a desire to
carry a 40kg ruck sack with him everywhere he goes is
the father of the house. Cries of 'girl' have already
been heard on the mountain, so we're gonna start to
hide his protection. Always a wise word spoken every
morning as he reclines in his velour dressing gown and
lamé booties.(photo4)
We have an early candidate for 'dirty stop out' of
the month. The fair antipodean Amelia rocked in at 10am
this morning. She's a known fan of the Alpaka Bar, our
local, and she loves a man in chef whites.....who could
it be?!!! See how she hides her face from the camera
in this morning after
photo!(photo5)
Scott's a straight forward kind of guy, lots of hair
and wind!!! He's perfected 'Franner', a west country
variation on the French language. He's quickly becoming
known as his alter ego - FLUFFY WEST.(photo6)
Ray moves around the apartment from room to room like
a samurai warrior. Now you see him, now you don't! Being
at this altitude has quite literally bought him closer
to the gods and he's feelin' it!(photo7)
A couple of the guys have proved handy in the kitchen
and we've enjoyed a number of feasts with dirty 2 euro
bucket wine (photo8). All in all it's been a great start
to the season in Tignes with everyone getting on swimmingly.
Now we have a truck load of snow things, i'm sure, will
only get better!!!
Meribel
The start of the season here in Meribel was looking
bleak - where there should have been snow everything
was very grey and the mountain was still bare rock!
But with some pretty full on snow machine work a couple
of pistes were miraculously produced and the first lifts
opened up on the day
the Planet Subzero guys arrived ... phew!
Conditions were still quite bad at first though with
very hard icy runs on the two or three lifts that were
open. But with loads of lovely new equipment to test
everyone's been getting out there - and from the sound
of things the Most Impressive Stack Award goes to James
for some huge but accidental aerobatics that unfortunately
we only caught the aftermath of! Luckily for James he
seems to bounce quite well so there's no permanent damage.
Given the lack of snow a lot of effort has been going
into apres ski activities with Chris, Russ and Phil
getting some good lights-on nights down at Dick's -
and they've got a great excuse as Kirsty and James are
working in the bar so of course it's only polite to
go and say hi.
On Thursday night the Freestylers were in town and
as everyone prepared themselves at the pub for another
night at Dicks it started to snow! Massive excitement
- obviously we then all had to spend most of the night
pint in hand, staring out the window transfixed by the
little white bits falling from the sky!! And since then
it hasn't stopped - it's been properly dumping for three
days now and there's snow piled up everywhere. Hopefully
this means the slopes will now all open and we'll be
able to get out there and explore.
Unfortunately both Phil and Russ are going to miss
out on this first dump (but fingers crossed that this
is just the first of many) as they've gone home for
a few days - have a great Christmas guys!
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