Hello 2013: Les Gets

This is the third in a series of four blog posts which ought to have been published during January 2013, but ran late because I didn’t want to publish any of them before the first one.

I barely spent any of January in the office at all, between my week working in London and the week directly after it, the latter of which I spent in the French Alps!

Les Bruyères; our chalet in the Alpine town of Les Gets.

Ruth, JTA and I had opted to make the entire journey from Oxford to Les Gets by land, because there had (up until recently) been the real possibility that Ruth would be pregnant (and air travel is somewhat riskier for pregnant women). Secondary reasons included the fact that flying is really, really bad for the planet, and that JTA’s a fan of staying on Terra firma as far as he can.

Ruth validates our tickets as we prepare to change trains, at a French station.

There were good and bad aspects of this kind of travel. Bad parts included having to be at a park and ride bus terminus well before the sun rose, in order to begin a mammoth journey that would take most of the day, and frantic dashes across the labyrinthine Paris metro. But on the upside, we didn’t at any point have to take off our shoes and get herded through backscatter machines, plus the fact that nothing makes you feel cosmopolitan quite like standing in the bar car of a TGV, rocketing through the French countryside, while you sip on a glass of pinot and watch the world fly by.

Ruth joins Becky, Harriet, Owen and Cat at the chalet's dining table. — Ruth joins Becky, Harriet, Owen and Cat at the chalet’s dining table.

We arrived, and met with the rest of our team: Ruth’s brother Owen, his girlfriend Cat and his friend Danny, JTA’s sister Harriet (who’d come over on the train from Lyon, where she’s studying right now), and my sisters Sarah and Becky. We also met our chalet host Dan, who – over the course of the week – put up with a great deal from us (not least our dinnertime conversations about duck rape, racial stereotypes, sex toys, self-defecation, and worse) and still stood there with a smile as he served us the most spectacular meals imaginable.

Owen shows Becky what it means to be "Double Bubbled". She remains unimpressed. — Owen shows Becky what it means to be “Double Bubbled”. She remains unimpressed.

And that’s without even mentioning “Double Bubble”, a game that Owen and Cat invented which seems to involve pinning people and tickling them. They claim that it’s the cause of the jumping, yelping, and screaming sounds coming from their bedroom on an evening, but I’m not convinced.

Looking over the valley from the summit of Chamossiere.

My first impression of the slopes of the Les Gets-Morzine area were that they were a little heavily geared towards intermediate skiiers, with lots of blue and red runs criss-crossing the mountains around the bowl-shaped valley, but before long I’d found my way out to some of the aggressively-mogul-ridden and steeper black and red runs that found out towards the edges of the resort.

Harriet, tangled around herself and buried in a snowdrift. — As a new skier, Harriet spent an incredible amount of time buried in snowdrifts, laying on her back, or tangled around a tree. It’s all part of the learning process.

It was particular fun to get out skiing with Sarah again, for the first time in years, and to finally prove to myself something that I’ve suspected for a while: that while my skiing ability is close to peaking, Sarah’s still continuing to improve and is by now a better skiier than I am. As we hammered our way down some of the roughest, fastest runs we could find on the final day before she and Becky returned to the UK, she’d pull ahead and it would be everything I could muster to keep up and keep control.

Sarah, about to try to egg me on to try another series of challenging runs, just as I'm getting my breath back from the last ones. — Sarah, about to try to egg me on to try another series of challenging runs, just as I’m getting my breath back from the last ones.

I also enjoyed finally getting to ski with Ruth, something that we’d wanted to do together for almost five years (during which we’d both skied, just – for one reason or another – never together). She’s one of those weird skiers who genuinely prefers to ski without poles, which I’d often quiz her about during our periodic high-altitude beer breaks.

Following one of my first proper tumbles in years - and damn, it was a spectacular one, snowballing down black run "Yeti" when I took a corner too fast - Sarah snapped this picture. — Following one of my first proper tumbles in years – and damn, it was a spectacular one, snowballing down black run “Yeti” when I took a corner too fast – Sarah snapped this picture.

In the video below (or watch on YouTube), she falls over at about 1m 19s, in case you want to skip to that bit.

Our new snowsportspeople – Cat and Harriet on skis for the second and first times in their lives, and Danny on snowboard for the first time in his – took to their sports like fish to water. Or, at their worst, like fish to waterfalls. But by the end of the week, every single one of them had made far better progress than I could have possibly imagined.

I'm sure that the hot tub was only meant to seat five or six, but that didn't stop us all piling into it at the end of a day's snowsports. — I’m sure that the hot tub was only meant to seat five or six, but that didn’t stop us all piling into it at the end of a day’s snowsports.

We worked ourselves hard, and by the time we were back in our hot tub on an evening, with glasses of gin in our hands, we really felt like we’d earned them.

Watch this space: a full gallery of all of the photos taken on the trip will be made available soon. Sorry about the delay.