I've been on holiday to the French Alps again! Been back a week now, but it's taken me until now to sort through the 300+ photos I took (split between 2 cameras, as I now have a little waterproof one too, which is rather cool)

Anyway, same campsite as last year, with some of the same people.  But this time, no floods and barely any rain!  So much more kayaking was done - not especially by me, as it turns out I'm not so keen on Alpine water (it's fast and continuous and scary).  Obviously I fell out of my boat (again), so had some lovely bruises for much of the time.

Ah well, it's all fun

When not boating/swimming, there was lots of chilling out, messing about on the lake, building rope bridges and some pedalo abuse on the lake down the road.

I'd been hoping to do some via ferrata again, but everyone else was busy paddling and the one day a few of us did go, it was lunchtime and the hire shop was closed!  Ah well - lunchtime also means scorching heat, so it might not have been the most sensible idea anyway.  I like having shade to sit it when it's like that.  Also not keen on sunburn, so I kept myself covered in factor 30 and 40 the whole time and (mostly) avoided turning into a lobster. Unlike some of the others

grr, there was more here but I went and accidentally deleted half my website and can't get it back   Will have to attempt to remember and rewrite it...

Other points of note:

• we saw marmots!!
• other groups seemed to suffer many epics and kit damage - we avoided this, and indeed gained kit (boats were won in the student boater-X)
• one 'interestingly' shaped vegetable can keep a bunch of lads amused for many hours
• shuttling is made difficult by road closures
• kerbs are evil

I 'celebrated' my birthday on the day we left the campsite - and spent the day driving through France as far as Verdun, where we stopped overnight.

tags: camping France holiday paddling