December news - belated!

Hello all and MERRY CHRISTMAS and a HAPPY NEW YEAR.

We are now back in France and man its cold!!! You forget how cold winter can be. Especially up a mountain in the Alps. No complaints though, the colder it is the more snow there should be…theoretically. There is a bit of a disappointing amount around. Much less than this time last year, but it will surely get better in the coming weeks. Fingers crossed!!!

So what have we been up to?

Dom and I had a pretty uneventful, though very long and tedious plane journey back to the Alps via Brisbane, Singapore, Dubai and finally Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris before embarking on the train leg. That’s where it all turned sour. What a crack up, I don’t know why we were surprised. Anything involving Dom and I and travel always seems to be a saga!

We were supposed to get a train to Bourg St Maurice at the bottom of our mountain and we could do it in 2 ways. Either go now and have to change trains in Aix or wait 4 hours and have a straight trip. We were cold at the station and eager to be on our way so opted for the go now.

We bought our tickets and waited to find the platform number on the screen. 7 minutes before our train it still hadn’t been announced so Dom went to investigate. Turns out the train we had just bought tickets for wasn’t running!!! Luckily we could still use our tickets for the next one which was a bonus, so we decided to just go on the next one even though we would have missed our connection. Better to be half way there than stuck 7 hours away. Who knew if the next one would end up running!

So we got to Aix and as we thought, we had missed the connection. We set out to find the next train as our timetable said there would be another in 2 hours or so (the one that was coming straight through to Bourg from Paris that we earlier rejected). Unfortunately our timetable and the train departure board showed some discrepancies. There were now no trains to Bourg at all until tomorrow. We were so close to home but still so far.

After ringing our bosses we then decided to go to the next big city, Chambery, as more trains might run from there. Without too much more trouble, we managed to get there. On arrival we found a whole heap of people with skis and snowboards and in obviously in the same boat as us. A good choice of station! Again, all trains to Bourg from here weren’t running either. Luckily for us (as it was near 8pm and we had been travelling for over 40 hours and were pretty much asleep on our feet), the train people realized they couldn’t get away with this many disgruntled people and put on a bus for the 70 of us. Hooray!!! We could finally make it to the Alps and to bed. What a trip!! Ha ha. Comedy eh!

So here we are now. We left NZ a week ago today and are now settled in and happy with the way things are looking. We have a wicked apartment to live in. 5 star compared to the one we had last year ‘the dungeon’. We even have an oven and fridge freezer and best of all, a bath!!! Might not sound like much but it beats last years shower taped together with tape, a non existent kitchen and a windowsill for a fridge!!!

The chalet is all up and running too, cleaned, stocked with food and decorated for Christmas. Dom and I get in our first guests tomorrow. We are looking forward to trying out our new menu and getting into it all again.

Needless to say, since being here, we have also found a bit of spare time to go skiing. There is not a major amount of snow, and not all the lifts are open yet, but it was such a good feeling to be out on the snow again and back on our favourite runs. We are looking forward to many more days out!!!

Will leave it there before I bore you all senseless. Have a good day, week, xmas and new years :)