Sun, snow and visitors...

Alright then, March and April have been pretty full on, so what have we been up to?  Well, since pretty much the end of February for six or seven weeks we had wall to wall blue skies with temperatures down in the valley up to about 25 degrees!  Up on the mountain we saw temps of around 12 degrees and with the strong sunshine we managed to work a bit on our tans (a bit too much in my case... it's gonna take a while to even out my goggle lines!).  We enjoyed a nice day up on the glacier with a picnic and a bottle of Desperado to wash down our baguettes...

Although the sunshine and warm temperatures were a welcome change from -24 degrees, it meant that the pistes took a bit of a hit.  Lower down secteurs such as Les Coches and Montalbert were really starting to suffer with quite a few "plaque de terre" starting to show through.  Still, the park was pretty good, if you could get there before mid afternoon.  We took another trip over to Les Arcs to see the park there as it is supposed to be pretty good.  To be honest, it wasn't really worth the 3 hour round trip for us to get over there!  A couple more rails and boxes, and a hip that we don't have in La Plagne but other than that the kickers didn't offer a great deal more than we've already got here.

We also had a great day out in Tignes when the X-Games came to town.  Although the day started off a bit rubbish when we were told that our season passes had to be accompanied by a slip of paper 'proving' that they belonged to us (despite having our photographs printed onto the cards!) before we could get our Tignes day pass, it went pretty well after that.  We decided just to buy a half day pass each so that we could at least get onto the slopes.  I'm sure that we didn't really get to see the best of Tignes so maybe it has more to offer than we got chance to see, but I'm not sure that I was all that impressed with the pistes we did get to ride.  There certainly didn't seem to be as much variety as there is in La Plagne.

And for anyone who hasn't seen our Facebook photies... we saw some awesome half pipe riding in the evening - including the one and only Shaun White!  Who, despite any personality defects he may or may not have, is an incredible boarder...

We also got to meet Louie Vito's dad, who was stood just behind us...

It was only the qualifiers that we got to see, as we could only go on the Wednesday (our day off) but the quality of the riders was still really good as they needed to make sure they got into the finals (obvioulsy, that's usually the point of qualifiers!).  Needless to say, Shaun White came first with a score of 89.6 which he scored for the run in the video above.  All in all, a pretty awesome event!


Oh, and we've still been working in the chalets, of course!!

The chalets have been more or less fully booked for the whole year and only in the last few weeks have we had a bit of a break.  Lady Luck was definitely on our side for the week that Ian's mum came to stay... it just worked out that both chalets were empty for the week that Geraldine had booked to visit and so Dan & Becky were kind enough to let us all stay in Petite Ecole!  A week of luxury and no work!

Fortunately we had a week of mostly sunny weather too, so we had the chance to get out and about and see some of the sights in the resort and also a daytrip to Bourg St Maurice.

We also went on the Luge track in Plagne Centre... great fun!

Earlier on in the month we got to spend to time with my buddies Emma and Andy Young as they were here in Belle Plagne on their jollies.  Total coincidence that we were here on our season and they were here on hols - both organised and booked totally independently!  Was really nice to see them both anyways, and would have been nice to ski with Emma except she's only gone and got herself preggers!!  Congrats to you both though, great news!!  Instead of skiing, we went drinking hot chocolate and sunbathing so I wasn't complaining!

Our third lot of visitors was our bezzies, Robbie and Lucy (aka Mitchers and The Wizard).

Needless to say, the week was epic, legendary, outstanding, amezzing, astronomical, out of this world, literally no word of a lie the best thing ever.  Take your pick.

After having had almost two months of snow-melting, slush-making heat, the day they arrived it started to snow again!  So the lucky beggars got to do some off-pisteing along with the Mont Blanc carving and park riding.  There were (literally, not even exaggerating) about 1000 photos and videos taken over the week, so rather than clogging up Blogger, or even the whole internet, with all of them, here are a small selection...

I'm certain that a mini video montage will follow shortly!  It was really nice to have these guys stay with us and share a bit of our La Plagne experience - a good time was had by all, I think!  To make it even better, for half the week only the little chalet was booked so Ian and I had the chance to take turns sharing the morning and/or evening with the guys.  Sad to see them go at the end of the week, but fingers crossed we'll be getting to see them again in the not to distant future! Woohoo! :D

Since they left on Wednesday, the weather has gone to the dogs and every single day has been a complete white-out so no riding for us!  A bit annoying as it's been snowing too, so there is a chance that there the pistes are nice and fresh and maybe even some nice off-piste lines to be had, but when visibility is so low it's just not worth it.  It better clear up soon... we leave in six days!!! Aaaagh!!

So, the end of the season looms closer and closer... what will the next part of our journey bring???

Ciao for now!

November signing out.