While at Les Prodains we’ve waxed our snowboards. This needs doing periodically; actually most people would probably have it done before each week’s holiday on the mountains so we’re a bit late! We had the boards fully serviced at Big Dreams snowboard shop in Wareham, Dorset, before we came away, so after 7 weeks of boarding it was well overdue.
Since my last post we spent the weekend in the car park at Les Prodains. It’s important to get there by Friday afternoon, because tourists start arriving from then for the weekend or to start their holidays, and we’ve been turned away on Saturday or Sunday before when the car park’s been full. The weather got colder, but we still went up the mountain every day.
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A very quick update because we’re parked outside a hotel to grab a quick bit of internet! The van’s sorted with two new tyres and the handbrake cable adjusted so that’s a relief. The charge was reasonable considering the size of our commercial vehicle tyres and we were only charged for one hour of labour. We also stayed the night in the garage’s car park while we waited for the second tyre to be delivered today! So if anyone visiting or staying in Morzine has any car problems I would definitely recommend ‘Carrosserie de Centre’, near the post office in Morzine town centre. The owner doesn’t speak English, but is very patient and can usually find someone else who does if necessary.
The weather’s been so good that I’m starting to worry about the snow disappearing! For the last 6 days we’ve had nothing but blue skies and sunshine, give or take the odd cloud here and there. We’ve seen lots of people parapenting – they jump off the mountain with a hang-glider type wing and float across the valley for hours, as well as speed-flying – a smaller wing which enables them to skim the snow on their skies and jump off big drops. We even saw a young boy flying a small kite while he skied down the piste – I can only call that snowkiting really!
We had a great day boarding with Steele and Julie. The sky was blue and it was warm when we were in the sun. There had been quite a bit of snow which, strangely, made the going pretty tough. The pistes hadn’t been ‘bashed’ flat by the 10 ton machines so as the powder gets carved up it gets bumpy. At least the landing’s quite soft if you fall but it’s hard on the knees! More >>
Just a quick post before we go snowboarding. It’s been a snowy few days so today having blue skies and sunshine we’re going to make the most of it.
At one point last week the Kipor generator would only run for 5 minutes at a time and sometimes wouldn’t generate electricity at all. This year electricity is crucial, without it we cannot work, blog or recharge our leisure battery. So we decided to order a Honda Generator from the UK and have it delivered to France. We went for the Honda EU20i, that gives out around 2kw rather than the 1kw of our old generator. With a 5 year Honda guarantee we hope this is our last generator purchase.
So, over the last few days we haven’t done much snowboarding, weather has been very miserable. A night was spent at the campsite getting power, working, doing laundry and not much time for sleeping. We briefly had new neighbours, Kathryn, Mike and their daughter Lucy in their Hymer motorhome; unfortunately the rainy weather was enough to send them on to their next resort, where we hope they’ve got lots of snow now. We drove to pick up the generator from Pringy yesterday (just like we had to with our last generator purchase) because courier companies in France are pretty useless.
This week saw the arrival of Steele and Julie from the UK in the sports centre car park. They’re spending most of this year in their van in Europe before heading back to Australia later on and, like us, have decided to stay mainly in the Portes du Soleil area for the rest of the winter season.
More soon and pictures galore now that we’re powered up!
Not a lot of blogging this last week because we haven’t been on-line much. The weather’s not quite so cold now and we’ve had some lovely blue-sky days that we’ve spent on the mountain.
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