France-tastic

A trip to the Alps for the February holidays is almost obligatory here, but it wasn't until everybody else started coming back from their trips, tanned and smiling and recounting with glee the fantastic times they had had on the slopes, that the skiing bug started seriously biting me. Even though we didn't have much holiday time, surely we could fit in a little trip, and outside of school holiday time, surely it wouldn't be that expensive?

After a bit of an internet hunt, and a bit of a random choice, we found a station- Orcières Merlettes- that looked good, and not too horrendously expensive, and decided to go for it for a week at the end of March. And it was fantastic! The snow hasn't been great this year since it has been a really mild winter, but the station was high enough (1800 to 2800 metres) that it was still fine, helped along with some snow canons on the lower slopes, and even though it was a small station by Alps standards, with 20 or so lifts, it was quite okay by Aus/NZ standards!

The absolute best thing though was that the hotel was right on the mountain, so you could literally walk out the hotel door, put your skis on, and ski down to the first lift. What a change from that awful drive up to the mountain from Queenstown! And in the hotel, we found that our next door neighbours were a french guy working in the hotel and his australian girlfriend, there for the season.




"Our" lift taking us to the middle stop, where the restaurant/bar was perfectly located to get the afternoon sun, and nothing but gorgeous mountain views. Our favourite!


Some of said gorgeous mountain views.


The summit of our lift, and the start of our favourite run that we started almost every day with.


Alex getting a start on that very run.


Us!


Our hotel, right on the slope, about 50 m up from the first lift. You can also see here how little snow there was off-piste on the lower mountain.


The town of Orcières, sitting just on the snow level.


Watch out, here I come!


In our hotel room: tanned, tired, happy. It's time to go home.


Ankle update: Still rather bruised and now also peeling (from the skin being stretched so tightly across the swelling I think), so really not getting any prettier (I won't post a picture!), but definitely getting less ouchy and the swelling is almost completely gone! The physiotherapist is massaging the blood away most days, which means I have started the last two days with a foot massage... If only it didn't hurt like hell, it would be quite the life! Oh yes, and today was back to work.