Ski holiday day 7: raclette for dinner

When we got into our chalet last Sunday, we had a good look around to see what equipment was in there. Lo and behold, in the kitchen cupboard was a raclette grill, so a big chunk of raclette cheese was written on the list for the Super U shop on Monday (and subsequently bought).

All week the daily question has been: is it raclette night tonight?

That is one big piece of cheese.

We might have done it a couple of days ago, but the cheese overdose of the La Bergerie pizzas stumped us, but we're running out of days and tonight was the night.

I don't think the grill had been used and there was one of those why-didn't-we moments when Sam said perhaps we should have checked that it worked before we bought the cheese; but it did work and there was considerable excitement as we settled down to Morteau sausage, gherkins, potatoes and salad - and cheese, of course.

The grill actually worked really well. When we stayed in Val Thorens, our whole chalet went out one night and we were seated at a round restaurant table with hardly any room. Four of us ordered raclette and you've never seen a table more crammed with food and accoutrements. What was worse were the wires trailing across the table (only just long enough to reach) and the red hot grills pouring out molten cheese in the middle. It has to rank as one of the most stressful, dangerous meals I've ever had. In the end, we turned off the grills and removed the burn risk; we were all lovely and warm on a cold night though.

Who ate all the cheese? Note the expert scraping technique.

No such problems with our Sainte-Foy raclette, we had lots of room and there was no need to trial wires across the table. It was Margaret's first raclette and she took to it like a duck to water, probably eating the most cheese, followed by Lucy, then Sam and me. As the responsible adult, I was positioned next to the grill and had to scrape (or supervise the scraping) of the cheese. Thanks to my care and attention, no-one suffered cheese burns and there was minimal drippage.

As for the skiing, I stayed in St Foy today, while Sam and Lucy went to Val D'Isere and had a great day. The best thing about Sainte-Foy (apart from the pretty village) is its location. It's easy to get to lots of other places - Les Arc, La Plagne, La Rosiere (Italy) and Tignes/Val D'Isere.

There was nice snow in Sainte-Foy, it had been quite cold overnight and was a little icy first thing, but the sun came up early and it was nice and quiet. I spent the morning skiing the blues and then broke for lunch with Margaret. We had a walk around the village in the afternoon.

Ski holiday day 6: my first half-pipe - ouch!

Today, went across to La Plagne for the day. It's only about 45 minutes drive and I've been before with Sam and Lucy. You can buy your tickets at a station when you turn off the main road and then drive up to the resort. The chatty lady at the ticket office told me I should park in Plagne Montalbert, but that's quite low down and we were worried that the snow cover might be a little thin down there so we carried on to Plagne Centre at 1970m, where we can park free of charge just at the bottom of the Bergerie lift.

La Plagne is a confusing collection of resorts, but they are well connected by runs and lifts and you just need to get your head around the whole place. I am gradually getting it properly compartmentalised in my head, but this is my third visit, so it's about time. La Plagne is on a bigger scale than Les Arcs and I think the key difference is that you can often see one resort from the other, which makes it harder for me to know where one stops and the other starts. Like many ski resorts, there's a difference between the resorts and this is mainly down to when they were developed. The more recent projects are much nicer, presumably because the developers have aimed for a more upmarket clientele, but also perhaps because planning regulations have caught up with the monstrosities being built on the side of beautiful mountains.

As you drive up the mountain, there's one particular monstrosity up on the right. I think it's called Plagne Aime 2000 and basically it's one massive hotel complex. When Sam and Lucy first saw it they thought it was being built and the building was covered with scaffolding, but no, those are the balconies. It must be seven or eight storeys high and I'd like to think that no-one would build anything like that nowadays.

Compared to Sainte-Foy, the skiing is much more varied and there are many, many more runs, but it is a lot busier and not as pretty. Snowboards are very much in the minority in Sainte-Foy, but here they often seem to be dominant. I should make it clear that I don't really have a big issue with snowboards; they can be a nuisance, but then so can other skiers.

There was quite a long queue for the Bergerie lift (the first time we'd seen a queue this holiday, so we took a smaller lift into Plagne Centre.

We took a couple of lifts up with the idea of doing some long runs down through the trees, but these were closed so, instead, we worked our way across the resort towards Plagne Bellecote, but coming down the final blue into the resort, we took an off-piste diversion to try a half pipe. This is like an open spout and the way to ski it is to run up the side until you lose speed, then turn quickly, run down the steep bit, gathering speed again until you slow down at the other side - repeat until finished.

I was skiing it reasonably well, but then got a bit fast, stopped concentrating and had a backwards crash. I bashed my head quite hard, so hard that I was surprised by the force (normally ski falls - and I've had a few - are comic and painless, but this one whacked me good and hard) My first thought was that it was a good job I was wearing a helmet. A quick shout here for the excellent RX Sport, which has provided varifocal prescription lenses for my Oakley semi-wraps (one of the few companies able to do this) and also provided Bolle goggles (with prescription inserts) and Bolle helmet (which was thoroughly tested.

Sam treats me like a toddler when I have a fall. Before I can start crying and feeling sorry for myself, he tells me I'm fine and skis off.  He was trying the same trick here and was at the bottom of the slope and queuing for the Arpette lift before I'd caught up. I thought I was OK, but I wasn't sure; I think I was just shocked by the force of the blow and it's a long time since I hit my head that hard so I had no calibration. Anyway, I told Lucy I was going for a sit down and a hot drink, so we all ended up having an early lunch and a couple of drinks in Plagne Bellecote.

Fantastic views from the top near Roche de Mio

The plan was that Sam and Lucy were going to ski some blacks they had missed last year down towards Montchavin while I did a long blue called Mont Blanc (there's a Mont Blanc in every resort around here) which I did last year, but when we saw the map of open routes after lunch, they were almost all closed due to lack of snow. Mont Blanc was open as it's the run down to the fast cable car between La Plagne and Les Arcs (the Vanoise Express). Once that's closed there's no link between the resorts and no Paradiski. The snow cover is poor this year and I guess those blacks are just a little too low. Mont Blanc will be open with artificial snow from the blowers running every available night.

We were now on Plan C and so we took the cable car up to Roche De Mio at 2700m, where there's a good view of Courchevel in the Three Valleys on the way up. The views from the top are fantastic and we skied down via Le Tunnel through Belle Plagne, where my friend Chris goes skiing each Easter, and up the Colosses lift to make our way to Plagne Centre.

Ski essentials - helmet, lemon tea and a Ricard. That's
ugly Plagne Centre in the background.

Sadly, the howling wolf noises and projections of bats on the wall of the tunnel seem to have been dropped in favour of stars. It's not quite the same! I left Sam and Lucy at the top of Colosses so they could try some routes they hadn't done before and I headed back down the mountain to the bottom of Bergerie (my reference point). I skied a few of the blues from Bergerie back down to  Plagne Centre where it's fun to ski through an arch in the big hotel complex on a green back to the base of Bergerie. I bumped into Sam and Lucy there. They hadn't wanted much time and the skiing had been quite icy and scary for them.

Lesson for today - leave half-pipes for the kids on snowboards.

Ski holiday day 5: We all overdose on cheese!

We deliberately didn't buy a week's ski pass for Sainte-Foy. This was mainly because Sam and Lucy had plans to travel to a few other resorts, but also because (if we were lucky) we'd get some coupons from Super U supermarket in Bourg-saint-Maurice which would give us money off a day's ski pass.

True enough, our big shop on Monday provided three coupons for cut-price ski passes which could be redeemed either on Wednesday or Saturday.

Today was /is Wednesday, so we got cheap passes and skied in Sainte-Foy. After the trials and tribulations of yesterday, it was nice to have an easy day's skiing.

Also, I tried out my contact lens/goggles combo instead of sunglasses and it worked a treat. I wish I'd had them yesterday, it would have been much easier. I've not worn contact lenses for a couple of years, so it took me a few attempts to get them in, but it was well worth it.

Quick drink with Margaret before lunch

I skied on my own during the morning, I've got my St Foy compass set now, so I skied all the blues in the resort (some of them three times). Sam and Lucy were doing some of the harder reds. We had planned to meet Margaret for lunch, but about noon, I was very thirsty, so I texted her from the top to see if she wanted to meet for a drink before lunch.

On the way down, I bumped into Sam and Lucy so we all skied down together; I met mum for a drink while Sam and Lucy skied another few runs.

We'd agreed that we'd have lunch at a restaurant called La Bergerie, which translates as The Sheepfold. The menu offers a nice line in steaks, but at lunchtime pizza is available. I had Royale, Margaret and Sam had a Catalane and Lucy had Quatro Fromages.

The pizza base was good, thin and crispy, but Lucy's was an inch thick with cheese - far too much - and mine was almost as bad (but with mushrooms, olives and ham). There was just too much cheese and it was also super salty. We had thought we might go there for dinner one evening (perhaps Saturday), the place has nice decor and pleasant service.

We had a quick ski after lunch, but it was very hard work with a belly full of pizza. We skied three blues and Sam got his GoPro camera attached to his helmet, so he took some videos with that. They turn out quite well.

Ski holiday day 4: over the border into Italy

Today we went to La Rosiere, the next-door resort to Sainte-Foy, and skied down into Italy to La Thuile.

La Rosiere is on the Petit Col de St Bernard, which is closed due to snow for five or six months of the year and the resort actually represents the highest point you can reach by car in winter. It's a hard road of switchback turns even to get that far. Incredible to think that this was the route Hannibal took to attack Rome during the Punic wars. How on earth he got his elephants over what must have been little more than a sheep track beggars belief.

From La Rosiere, there are a couple of long lifts up towards the ridge of the mountain, which also represents the border between France and Italy. We'd got a pass covering both La Rosiere (French side) and La Thuile (Italian side) so we could ski right down. There were a couple of red runs involved, but Lucy said I'd manage those quite easily and, anyway, it was time Sam stopped mollycoddling me! She’s a hard taskmaster!

The wind was whistling in our faces on the lift, then the cloud closed in and it started snowing. We reached the top, where there is an old fort - one of many in this part of the Alps, built in the 19th century to command the mountain passes. It must have been a cold, miserable place to be posted in winter. I don't think any of them saw action and, by the turn of the 20th century, they were  made redundant by superior artillery. Instead of impregnable bastions, they became juicy targets.

La Thuile from the top of the cable car. Pic by Lucy

Anyway, we could barely see the fort in the skidding cloud and snow and then we had a long, cold drag lift to suffer before we could start to ski down.

Visibility was pretty poor and the piste was covered with powder snow in places, which made the edge harder to spot, but ice in other parts where the wind had blown the snow off.

Last year, I tried a couple of different things to see in the snow. My prescription sunglasses work quite well when it's bright and sunny and I had goggles with prescription inserts as well. However, I can't get on with those at all - the effect is like looking through binoculars and it really unsettles my balance because I don't have any peripheral vision.

This year, I have the sunglasses and have also brought contact lenses to use with my goggles. I'll also carry the old prescription inserts to use as reading glasses, so I can read a piste map if need be.

Today, I thought it would be sunny, so I was wearing sunglasses, which definitely weren't needed. Having said that, the runs were not too difficult, but I did ski off one piste when I failed to spot the piste marker pole and went off into the soft snow at the side  and almost buried myself. I had to take a ski off and pretty much roll back onto the piste. Lucy had gone off ahead and the plan was to meet her in La Thuile by skiing the red run which follows the road. In the summer it is the Petit Col St Bernard; in the winter, it's covered in snow and is a ski run. It's quite amusing to ski past the road signs and round the hairpin bends.

We were making progress down the mountain when we were brought to a stop by the piste being closed. We've no idea why - perhaps the snow cover was too thin or there was a risk of avalanche; maybe it was too windy.

Fortunately, there was a cafe right by where we were halted, so we popped in there for a hot chocolate. It was definitely Italy because they were not speaking French. It was a fantastic hot chocolate and one English woman was so happy in the place, she refused to go out into the cold. She said she'd stay there until her husband had finished skiing.

The closed piste gave us a bit of a problem. Sam scratched his head for a while and then we headed up a chairlift onto the Italian slope of the mountain into the ski area above the village of La Thuile. Here the weather was brighter and I enjoyed skiing down to the top of the cable car that comes up from the village. The Italian Special Olympics team were practising in La Thuile and there were lots of handicapped people skiing about.

I think some of them may have been at the "improver" stage because they weren't that good. Others were doing really well (by which I mean much better than me).

We'd just missed Lucy and Sam set off to try to catch her up on the long black down to the village. I sat in the watery sun by the cable car to wait for them. They actually weren't too long; it's surprising how much distance even a poor skier like me can cover. Sam and Lucy can go for miles and miles and do it double quick.

The piste board didn't make great reading. The lift we had planned to take back was closed and so were quite a few more, so we had to try a circuitous route of reds, blues and lifts to get back to La Rosiere. Sam was a bit worried that we might be stuck in Italy overnight and, as he and Lucy had left their passports back in Sainte-Foy, it would have been up to me to book a hotel room and smuggle them in.

It was good to eventually see La Rosiere back in view. The long, wide piste we'd seen from the first chairlift seemed very, very long, but it wasn't hard. I was absolutely pooped (in a good way) and was pleased to have a Ricard and lemon tea in the bar next to the St Bernard Hotel. There were terrific views of the Tarentaise valley on the way down - you could see Arc 2000 with its ugly hotels in the bowl and Arc 1950 just below it, but hardly visible as the buildings blended in so much better. Bourg-saint-Maurice was to your right and, up the valley was Sainte-Foy, Tignes and Val D'Isere.

The sun had come through the clouds and was making superb colours to the south-west as it was setting. I tried to take a picture of it, but all I got was a Renault Clio as we entered yet another hairpin bend.

Looking up the Tarentaise valley towards Tignes and Val D'Isere.

Ski holiday day 3: are those my edges that I can feel?

Our first day skiing in St Foy and it was a pleasant day, a little cloudy and snowing lightly at the top, but the snow was really nice and some fresh snow had fallen overnight.

Sam says the snow cover is very thin and they need lots more snow if they're going to get through the season. He can see off-piste areas that he and Lucy skied last year where this year you can see rocks which were completely covered in 2014.

I don't have those worries as I'm staying on the piste. There are just four lifts in Sainte-Foy and as one of them leads to some reds and a piste nature, I'm limiting myself to just three. The blue down from the top lift is a lovely run, fairly steep in the very top section, but good and wide, it then levels out, steepens, levels out and steepens again. It's a really nice run for someone of my level to do.

With Sam's coaching, I found that I'm starting to carve properly and my turns are getting smoother and more controlled. I can actually feel the edges getting engaged on the downhill ski and I'm learning to bend my hip into the slope to make the edge bite and avoid skids. It is a good feeling, although when the slope gets steep, I still find that my turns are not quick enough and I have to carve quite long turns in order to control speed. What's good is that I can stop and I have got the skid stop fairly well nailed, which gives me quite a bit of confidence.

What's more I've been skiing for two days and not fallen over. I've also discovered a new run called Plan Bois, a gentle blue which takes you from the top of lift one back to base via a gently graded ski road through the wooded side of the mountain. We walked part of it on snow-shoes last year when we went to La Monal. Lucy, who has new off-piste skis, despairs at my ability to find a 'Gollet' in any resort.

We had a quick drink in the Piano Bar at the end of the day and discovered it sells a wide selection of Belgian beers! Our other job for the day was a trip to Super U in Bourg-saint-Maurice (about 20 minutes drive). It was a familiar sight from last year and we stocked up on beer, wine, cheese and meals for the week, which Sam had planned the night before.

I mentioned that Sainte-Foy has a lot of English holidaymakers and it's far more middle class than Les Arc or La Plagne. For example, the chalet next to us is occupied by husband, wife, baby, nanny and springer spaniel called Merlin. He can be seen chasing a tennis ball in the snow each afternoon when his owners have finished skiing.

Lucy has also been eavesdropping on conversations. She heard two men bemoaning past divorces; one had lost two houses (presumably to two failed marriages) and, to rub salt in the wound, his ex-wife had gone to the estate agent and sold the house just after the market crashed. Apart from divorce, the other favourite theme is diet and the theory is that the ski-resort diet of cheese, sausages, potatoes and alcohol is offset by calorie burning on the slopes.

"I must have burned two-thousand calories today."

"More, you burn an extra thousand just being at this altitude."

It would be nice if it was true.

Ski holiday day 2: I'm back on skis

I wanted to make quite an early start (8am) in order to meet Sam and Lucy in Annecy, so we were first to breakfast. There was plenty to eat and Novotel gets a good mark from us.

Outside, the car was covered in thick frost and there was a freezing fog. It looked pretty grim, but I put "Annecy centre" in the sat nav and off we went. The roads were dead quiet and the fog soon became thinner and then disappeared completely.

We were in Annecy within two hours; Margaret texted Sam to say we were getting close and he said to meet us at the car park by the Hotel de Ville. I was busy looking for that when we passed Hotel Splendid where they had been staying, so I pulled up in front to get my bearings. Margaret said she could see Sam in reception and, sure enough, he was just checking out. Lucy had gone on ahead to the car park. We loaded their cases into the car (it was a tight fit), Sam texted Lucy to say come back and we were all set for Sainte-Foy.

Beautiful Annecy - on Lucy's iPhone 6

I'd been to Annecy last year with Sam and Lucy and we'd had a nice wander around the mediaeval centre and also a swim in the lake. There was no swimming today, but Sam took over the driving and it was good to see the place again - it is a beautiful location.

Sam and Lucy had not had a great journey yesterday. They'd flown from Jersey to Geneva and had hoped to get a bus to Annecy. Unfortunately, there was just one bus available and it was a long wait, so they'd had a very chilly afternoon in Geneva and got to Annecy much later than planned. At least their hotel booking was on the computer!

Annecy and the drive to Albertville was familiar and once we got into the Tarentaise valley, it seemed like going home. The gothic churches are dotted about the hillsides and going past Bellentre brought back memories of a sunny walk last spring. If it was familiar for me, it must have been much more so for Sam and Lucy, who lived here for seven months and were both feeling quite nostalgic about the place.

We got to Sainte Foy by just after noon and found the cleaners still busy, so we dropped our bags, parked the car and went to a cafe by the bottom lift for lunch. It was a lovely sunny day - quite similar to our last visit when we'd snow-shoed to La Monal and had visited the same bar at the end of our trek. We got a seat on the sunny terrace, surrounded by high, snowy mountains and I have to say - this beats sitting on a hot beach any time! We had the fixed menu - massive salad for starter, then sausage and polenta. I was very full, but Sam and I had said we'd have a ski in the afternoon, so we had to keep moving! The snow was lovely and the resort really quiet.

We only skied for an hour or so and then called in at the Piano Bar for a drink. Sam has a lot on his plate right now. He's about to buy into the doctors' practice in St Helier so has been arranging the loan for that, he'll soon buy into the pharmacy business as well and will then need to borrow more money to buy a house, perhaps in 2016. It's a lot of debt to take on - perhaps seven times annual earnings - compared to me where my maximum debt has never been more than three times annual earnings. Debt is such a necessary evil for young people today. For sure, my children earn a much better salary than I did, but they are saddled with debt from the age of 18 when they leave for university. Owing so much money must be really stressful and quite scary, especially with inflation being so low. At least I had the advantage of relatively high wage and retail price inflation to devalue my debt and make it easier to pay. Interest rates hit 15 per cent during the 1980s, but inflation was pushing 20 per cent some years. I'm not sayings that's a good thing - it definitely isn't - but an inflation rate of two or three per cent does help reduce debts quite a bit over 10 years and, with government debt being so great, I'm pretty sure they'll be making sure we get back to those levels quite soon.

Our Sainte-Foy chalet is fantastic, there are three bedrooms downstairs, two bathrooms, a large lounge kitchen upstairs and a mezzanine area at the very apex of the roof. It's fitted out to a good standard  and the views from the front are amazing (as this picture from Lucy shows).

View down the Tarentaise towards Bourg-Saint-Maurice from our chalet.

Ski holiday day 1: It's not my fault - right?

Sam has organised this year's ski holiday. I know that I'm going to Sainte-Foy in the Tarentaise and I've been there before to snow-shoe, but not to ski. I've had nothing to do with the chalet booking, the dates chosen and even the travel arrangements have been somewhat decided for me in that Sam and Lucy chose to fly to Geneva and then have an overnight stop in Annecy (where we were to pick them up).

I might have been a bit grumpy about a diversion (short-cut, as Sam described it) via Annecy, but I didn't really mind and it's been nice not to have to have worried at all about the planning of this trip.

I didn't really get organised on the few things I had to do until the week before when I booked the ferry, booked a hotel (so we could break the journey overnight), cleaned the car, checked the tyres, found all my ski gear and also grabbed some Euros via the post office.

As is usual people were checking whether I'd done this or that and questioning the logic of my decisions.

We were going via ferry? Why not the tunnel? It's quicker and easier; it's been very windy - will the crossing be rough? Will the ferries even be running?

Where are you staying overnight? Why Mâcon? What's there? My choice of hotel (an Ibis Budget) also raised a few eyebrows, particularly when it transpired that our friends (who are also on holiday, although not with us) are paying more per day for their dog to be looked after than we are for our hotel!

Anyway, it all seemed to make sense to me. Cases were packed, luggage just about crammed in and we left at 7am on Saturday morning to catch the 11am ferry from Dover to Calais. It was actually a beautiful morning, very bright and sunny so that I needed my sunglasses as we headed south east into the low sun through Kent.

The ferry was on time, the crossing super smooth and it was sunny all the way. I later discovered there had been a fire on a lorry in the Channel Tunnel and had we booked that then we'd have suffered severe delays. That was a stroke of luck (I knew my decision making was flawless).

The sunshine continued as we drove through France and everything seemed rosy until we shipped up at the Ibis Budget, Mâcon Nord.

It is a hotel designed as a cheap stop-over for travellers, so it's right next to the toll booth by the autoroute. Even in the dark, the location isn't great and there are three hotels side by side - Ibis Budget, Formula 1 and Novotel. Margaret said she wished we were staying at the Novotel, which looked like the Ritz in comparison.

In Ibis Budget reception, things took a turn for the worse. It was a dreary place, very untidy and with open storeroom doors giving a view of boxes and linen. A young lad was on reception and his English was about as good as my French. He said he didn't have a record of our booking and I was at the wrong hotel. He then started a 10-minute telephone conversation with someone and was completely uninterested in helping me.

I knew I had the right hotel because the Ibis website will programme your sat-nav and I'd transferred the hotel code to my TomTom, which had brought me there. What's more, I had a confirmation e-mail and a booking code on my phone. The only question was: would my phone battery last longer than the receptionist's telephone conversation?

It did; he agreed we were in the right hotel and that I had a booking reference number. The problem was that his computer didn't know anything about it. It turns out that the one bit of really good English that he knows is: "You agree, it's not my fault right?"

He said he had a room, he agreed we had a booking, but he couldn't release the room because we weren't on his computer. It was almost like a Little Britain comedy sketch (the computer says no). His solution was that we should pay for a room and then perhaps his manager would sort it out in the morning.

I wasn't at all sure his manager would sort it out; I was getting very grumpy about the whole thing; I have a Yorkshireman's aversion to being asked to pay for what I've already paid for and so I told him that I agreed it wasn't his fault, but I wouldn't be staying there and we walked out.

Margaret celebrates her stay at Novotel,

Mâcon Nord with a glass of wine.

You have to be careful what you wish for - a saying with more than a ring of truth about it that night as I walked into the Novotel reception to see if they had a room. They did, they were jolly nice and friendly, the place had a dining room, so we could have food, drink and breakfast. It cost me €200 instead of €35 (although dinner wasn't budgeted in the last one).

The holiday is just 12 hours old and already I have a major complaint. I'll give Ibis such a shit review on Trip Adviser ... whoops, it turns out that several dozen people have beaten me to it! I particularly liked the story about the dog convention when the place was full of barking dogs and this chap was trying to get some sleep ...

I should have read Trip Adviser before booking - perhaps we'd have gone straight to the Novotel and missed out this little experience altogether.