Skiing holiday - great day's skiing

We hadn't expected a good day on Wednesday. Snow Forecast.com, the oracle that Sam consults every evening and morning, had predicted a cold and cloudy day with 4mm of snow. Snow Forecast.com, if you want my opinion, is about as useful as hanging a fir cone outside your window.


The day dawned bright and clear - near perfect, although it promised to be cold and so we were well wrapped up. I had on my motorcycles gloves, thicker socks and my long johns.


We started with the usual warm up and then headed across to the Mont Blanc chairlift, which is the longest in the resort and brings you up to the top of the Belverdere blue run. There was a great view of Mont Blanc, completely clear of cloud in the cold morning air and almost directly to the north of us.


This time we carried on down Belvedere, which is nice and wide, pretty even gradient with just one or two steeper bits which we were able to master easily. I would have liked to have gone a bit faster, but Guy was keen to show us some new techniques and to have us practise those he taught us yesterday.


We're all trying to execute a parallel turn, but I find it quite hard and even harder at the slower speeds we were travelling at. I can see that one or two of the group have got it better than me. Fagin, despite her puffing and piste dodging, is a pretty good skier and the new bloke, who looks like Tim, is very precise and considered but does seem to go very slowly. One of the exercises we did yesterday was to place a pole on the inside, more or less at the apex, and to turn around that. We were practising this down a long steeper section and I got the rhythm just right. The sexy Irish woman had followed me down and when we got to the bottom she said she'd been copying me and it had been amazing.


Just as I think I might be making a skier, Guy pops up with another drill. The ones I couldn't do for the life of me were the stepped turns and the skating movement. The stepped turn is to be used when you want to turn into the hill to lose speed. I involves lifting the inside leg and steering to upwards, then transferring the weight onto that leg, bringing the other leg parallel and then reapeating the whole sequence a couple of times until you've come to a natural stop. I was not very good at this. Guy didn't even bother to comment, he just looked at me. The skating movement is what you use when you've lost speed and need to cross a flat piece of piste or even go slightly uphill. You push with one leg and glide with the other on alternate legs. It's like ice skating (which I have done in the distant past) but much harder on skis because they're about 1.7 metres long. We all had to do it in turn and I watched the others carefully. The trick is to really tarnsfer the weight with an exaggerated rocking motion. I started off quite well and then the co-ordination went to pieces. "Come on Eric," said Guy in a disappointed tone.


The next exercise was slipping the edges on a steep slope. You start with your skis at right angles to the slope with both inside edges gripping the slope and holding you in place. To move down in a slow, controlled manner, you turn both skis downwards, so the edge loses grip and you slide down, controlling the descent by the angle of the ski and the bite of the edge into the snow. You can slide sideways, allow some forward movement or even backwards if that's helpful. I quite enjoyed this exercise. To get the contol, you have to lean out over the slope, which seems an unnatural (and slightly scary) thing to do. Some of the girls didn't like it much and Guy got really cross with the English girl who was too frightened to move for about five minutes.


We'd learned this on the last day at Val Thorens, but Guy had taught it much better and given us several chances to use it. My turns and side sliding meant I was much more confident on steeper slopes and on the way back, we did a short red stretch and were allowed to go down the steeper side of the chairlift approach.


Guy and I were getting along fine. I think he appreciated my careful (and somewhat exaggerated) observation of the slope - like a begoggled meerkat on skis. On the chairlift, I found myself in the middle between Guy and Aofe and we had a nice chat about various things from jobs, where we lived, driving through France, where I was staying and what Guy does in the summer. It turns out he has a bed & breakfast in the Verdun Gorge in Provence. He liked it that I'd heard of the place and that I knew it was popular among motorcyclists for its great roads. He asked me if I "practised motorcycles" and seemed impressed when I said I did. Guy always likes to point out local attractions (eg Mont Blanc) and he was telling us about the mountains in summer, Apparently, Belvedere is a nine-hole golf course and when he asked if anyone playeed golf, I was the only one who did. I got more brownie points by joking that I'd be able to hit my driver a long way and mimicking a golf swing into the valley. From naughty boy to teacher's pet in two days - I could teach some of my group a thing or two about upward management!


We went back up the Combette chairlift and at the top Guy announced we'd be going on the Vezailee drag lift. That nearly caused a riot among the French with Fagin leading the dissent and breaking into English to get us onside. In the end, she was persuaded to give it a try and it brought us higher up the slope just above a little slalom area. We used the slide and turn skills to complete the slalom course and then headed back down the blue into Arc. There was just time for another quick run and a try at the steeper end section and that was it. The French, one of the Irish and the English girl had bailed by this time. 


It was a great morning's skiing and I really felt that I'd made progress.


I wasn't meeting Sam and Lucy for lunch today. I thought it was a bit restricting for them to meet me every day, so I'd suggested I'd come down and back to the apartment in the afternoon, leaving them free to roam where they wanted to. Later, Lucy said she'd had her best day skiing ever, so that was good to hear.


The walk to the furnicular was not too bad. On previous days, I'd stopped for lunch before going down and had stiffened up, meaning it was a real effort to get going again. I walked through the square and up to the Mont Blanc lift and then skied down a little pisted road to the top of the furnicular. As the train came up to the top, there were two children in the driving seats, with the operator stood behind them. Only in France would that happen. Over here, could you imagine a Victoria Line train pulling in with a kid at the controls? Actually, the only thing VL drivers have to do is open and close the doors, so it's not unlike a furnicular.

Maurice - she loves chicken

It had been a great day and I was met by Meribel, who enjoyed very much one of the leftover chicken legs from the previous night. We were soon joined by Maurice, so they shared a second between them.


It had been a great day's skiing, but in the evening my leg was really sore and swollen - almost twice the size of my right leg. I rolled a spare duvet to raise it in the night to try to get the swelling down.