A big day for reminiscing. Most significantly it’s 25 years of marriage; I have no intention of getting all gushy here, suffice to say “best decision I ever made.” As we near the end of our Alpine episode, it was also amusing to compare photos from a very early visit we made to the valley and from today during what is, possibly, our last visit. Many, many good memories from those intervening years.
Photos courtesy of Rob.
When we opened the shutters this morning, the sun was piercing the clouds in the valley, heralding the start of a new day.
It might seem odd that, given the flavour of the last 2 days’ blogs – lots changing in our lives and not much time to sort it out – the first thing we do is go on holiday! Well that’s never a bad way to approach a problem, but in this case, not only was it pre-planned but it affords us an opportunity to start the ball rolling on one of our major tasks. We have been privileged and fortunate to own an apartment at the foot of Mt Blanc in the French Alps for the last 9 years. We have had some fantastic experiences from holidaying here and will always treasure the wonderful memories they have generated, but now is the time to move on and so we have to sell the place. On approach to the mountains this evening it seemed as if they were putting on a special show for us as if to say..’how can you possibly be thinking of leaving us, are we not the most beautiful and fairest of all locations?’
In winning the Chamonix World Cup Downhill race twelve days ago, Romed Baumann from Austria, came down our local Verte des Houches/Kandahar slope on his Salomon skis in 2 minutes 1.58 seconds. Earlier this week our team of 11 skiers from 3 families managed it in about 19 minutes. Alternatively, if you put your skis in the gondola at the bottom and get to the top by mechanical means, it takes about 8 minutes going in that direction. But, what if you put skis on at the bottom and push/slide/grunt your way to the top; how long would that take? Well today we set out to try a new sport, ski-mountaineering, in an attempt to discover just that. We discovered some other things too, such as; you generate a lot more heat going up than coming down and need to wear far fewer clothes, you need a lot to eat and drink to get you to the top, it is tiring enough that it is possible to sleep after lunch whilst lying on on the snow in the sun, most people think you are mad to go uphill on skis, there are many more photo opportunities on one trip up compared to one trip down, a chocolat chaud at the top and a cold beer at the bottom are possible definitions of bliss and one day hire charges for ski-mountaineering equipment are extortionate. Our legs now ache, but we all agree it was a fabulous day and we’d like to do it again sometime. Oh yes, the answer is; about four hours.
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