Les Arcs

Has been a while since my last post, but there hasn't been a whole lot to blog about. Besides, I don't think I've been home long enough to sit down and actually come up with something decent enough to post, until now.

Last weekend I made my first ever trip to a proper ski resort, Les Arcs, in the French Alps. I wasn't sure about this particular trip as it involved jumping on the Eurostar at 6:30pm Friday night, travelling overnight to the resort (arriving at 7am Saturday morning), skiing around the place for a day, then jumping back on the Eurostar at 10pm Saturaday night to be back in London by 10am Sunday morning. Sound insane? Well, of course, we had to make it just that little bit more insane...

During the week, we decided that we would take it easy on the way there so that we weren't too wrecked for the skiing. I should have known from the start that this plan would fail, and from the outset, this was clearly evident. After meeting at a pub at Waterloo before we caught the train, then stopping for another 2 pints in the departure lounge, we piled onto the train and quickly comandeered a small section of one of the carriages. We then proceeded to make several trips to the drinks car, returning with champagne, vodka, beer and red wine. Several trips were made until we totally cleared out the train's supply of alcohol. The last few hours of the trip are rather hazy, but I think we finally got to sleep at about 5am. When I woke up, I was asleep on the floor and completely surrounded by rubbish. When I looked around, I noticed the entire section we were in was covered in rubbish, and the other people that were in the same section as us had moved elsewhere. God knows what happened in there before we all passed out...

Upon arrival, I thought I had lost my mobile phone, so was digging frantically around on the floor in all the rubbish looking for it. Just as I had given up, Paul knocked on the window waving it at me. Turns out someone threw it at him while we were sleeping, so he decided to keep it, not knowing who it belonged to. Thanks Paul! We were all still drunk but decided to soldier on and attempt to make our way up the mountain. This lead to a round-trip of the station, including a slide down a snow-covered embankment, before we arrived at the "funiculaire" which would take us up to Arc 1600.

After finally making it up the mountain, it was then time to get into more appropriate attire, have something to eat, and lock away our bags for the day. Problem was, it was only 8am, and NOTHING was open. We managed to convince the owner of some dodgy bar to let us in and provide us with food. We motioned that we wanted "breakfast", and were served many generous helpings of toasted bread and jam. Yummo! At least we all had a chance to get into our snow clothes which made walking around outside much more pleasant. Shaun had to lie down on a bench for 5 minutes before we left though, as the floor beneath him started spinning.

Next challenge was finding somewhere to store our luggage. Not easy when you can't speak a word of French and lost your phrasebook on the train. Luckily me and Renae talked the people we hired our ski gear off to hold our bags for us, as walking around in ski boots, as I have since learnt, is very difficult indeed! We somehow made our way to the place we had our lesson booked for, met up with our strange French instructor, Roland, and began our 2-hour introduction to the joys of skiing. The only problem was that we forgot to organise a meeting place with the others and left our mobile phones in our bags... Oops!

I have to say, skiing is extremely f*cking hard!! The fact that we were extremely hungover and only on 2 hours sleep probably didn't make it any easier, but it wasn't long before I was falling on my arse, screwing up the "snow plough", and being generally absolutely useless. Renae was much better than me. After about an hour of moving up the hill then sliding back down, I was totally exhausted, so when the instructor suggested we go up the ski lift to the top, I was a little hesistant.

After some persuasion, I found myself on the lift to the top. It actually wasn't that scary, and I found I wasn't as useless as I was at the bottom of the mountain. All of a sudden I could do the snow plough and sort of turn a bit as well. For some reason though, Renae lost it and became as useless as I was. Our poor instructor spent most of his time going between me and Renae helping us up off our arses. I ploughed into a wall of snow at one point and couldn't get out, and Renae got stuck at the top of a crest and couldn't move. By the time we got the bottom, I swear our instructor was ready to kill us. He wouldn't have had to do much though because we were close to dying from exhaustion anyway!

After the lesson, we somehow managed to find somewhere to eat lunch, then found ourselves a nice cosy couch in a hotel foyer and slept for a couple of hours. After that we summoned up the strength and courage to go up ON OUR OWN! It actually didn't take us too long to get back down and I got better and better as we went along, although I did panic every time I build up some speed, and ended up falling into several deep piles of snow that were impossible to get out of. The snow was very deep in some places (several feet?), so getting up was a very interesting exercise indeed.

Light began to fade fast, and we still hadn't managed to find any of our group. Decided to take our gear back and begin the search - it didn't last long. As we went into the shop, Paul emerged from a bar frantically waving his arms at us. Turns out they were in the exact same bar when me and Renae (in our dazed state) looked in there for them at lunchtime. Oops again...

After some drinks and dinner, it was time to get back on the Eurostar and go home. We had planned to make a night of it on the way back, but guess what happened instead? Yes, that's right, SLEEP! We all slept the whole back. Knackered! And it didn't end there. Spent all of Sunday in bed, rose to eat, then went back to bed at 10pm that night. Holiday? I think not!!

So there you have it. My first skiing experience but definitely NOT my last. Pictures of the adventure can be found here. Most of them are of us getting hammered on the trip there because I was bit too scared to get my camera out when we were actually on the ski runs. Still worth a look though I think... :)

Right well that took way too long to write so I'm going to end it here and write another entry tomorrow... Toodles!