I finally learnt to ski!

We found a last minute deal to stay in a catered chalet in Les Arcs (seriously - booked Wednesday to fly on Saturday morning), then I had a mad scramble of trying to find suitable ski clothing.  Turns out the end of March isn't an ideal time to find winter things in the shops, so I ended up borrowing stuff from various lovely friends.

mountains are pretty

As I hadn't skied before (not counting 3 painful lessons on the dry slope many years ago), I spent my mornings in ski school.  The first few days we just snowploughed, but just at the point it was starting to hurt my knees we moved on to parallel.  So much better!  It took a lot of confusion, frustration and shouting from the instructor ("why are you snowploughing?!"  "I don't knowwww") but then it suddenly clicked - it's just about transferring your body weight.  After that I was sorted, and by the end of the week starting to get a bit annoyed with the rest of the group for being slow...

Afternoons were mostly spent practising my newly found skills, apart from Sunday when I didn't know anything worth practising, and Thursday when the visibility was rubbish.

Lunch wasn't really a thing (massive breakfasts and three course evening meals does that to you), but there was the odd bit of pizza and vin chaud:

lunch on the slopes. yummy

Of course, I did fall over a few times!  But snow is nice and soft, so apart from a bruise from the toggle on my coat, and injured pride after faceplanting getting off a chairlift, I returned home uninjured.

By the end of the week I'd skied all but one (d'oh) of the blue runs around Arc 2000, which feels like a good achievement for my first week!  I'll definitely go skiing again, it was great fun.

tags: France holiday skiing