Explore europe in a campervan

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.

We returned to our old haunt – the car park at Les Prodains, both last weekend and the Friday just gone. I’m happy to report that there is still no restriction on campervans parking there, although we saw only one other during the 4 days we spent there. The one drawback is no internet, but we love the fact that we can get straight onto a chair lift onto the mountain, then can board right down into the car park at the end of the day. Last year we even took the gondola back up after the chair lifts had shut on the last day of the season and kept doing that until about 8pm.

Yesterday we headed over to Switzerland to reacquaint ourselves with that area and check out the kite spot. There’s a huge new chair lift in Les Crosets, replacing a chair and a drag lift that were there last year. In my limited experience I’ve never seen an 8 seater chair lift – the queue certainly moved fast! The pistes on the Swiss side were in good shape – maybe a bit less mogully than Avoriaz and the ‘Superpark’ looked immaculately groomed. Simon only took one run through and I think he’d need more to properly size up some of the pretty big jumps.

In Avoriaz the park boys have been busy too. On Proclou which is a blue run very suitable for beginners they have created a sort of mini-Stash to the side of the piste. (The Stash is the ‘natural’ snowpark through the trees, with wooden rails and a wooden picnic table to ride.) This new area has a tiny wooden hut where people stop for a rest, just like the big Stash. There’s a kicker next to the hut which you can take at it’s highest or lowest point so suitable for mixed levels, then two wooden ‘boxes’ – flat wooden platforms about as wide as a snowboard, and another kicker which I found a bit to straight up for me! It’s really good to see little park areas made for varying abilities, and away from the regular snowpark environment which can be intimidating.

The other development has been around the top of the Arare snowpark. (We call it the ‘big boy’s park’ cause there’s less audience and bigger jumps than Chappelle in the middle of Avoriaz). The area has been turned into a short boarder-cross track with banking turns and jumps. Boarder cross is a racing event that can get a bit physical, with several snowboarders jostling for position. That track leads into a halfpipe at the top of the park. Simon’s pretty good in there – getting quite high up the sides and doing 180s. Me? I just side slip my way down and get out as quick as possible!

Not much else to report. We made our first batch of flapjacks though and they’re gooood! We felt terribly self-sufficient pulling them out of the rucksack for lunch on the chairlift yesterday.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Diary, Snowboarding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.