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Published: March 1st 2008
The plan was to have a uni reunion, a road trip and a skiing holiday all rolled into one. It sounded like a great idea, but it rested heavily on Mama and Papa Freitag's generosity as they provided not only the use of their chalet but also their car with winter tyres in order to help us get down there!
Six of us, James, Sarah and Steve to complete the uni reunion along with my sis and her boyfriend Nigel, met up in Faversham and headed down to Dover to take the ferry across to France. Saturday morning saw an early start and beautiful weather for us to enjoy the road trip down to Switzerland. The tunes were on and the banter was flying as we made it to the chalet in good time and were able to crack out the wine and the Articulate in celebration - which was to prove a hit throughout the holiday!
Our first day of skiing saw Sarah's fluent French become invaluable as the guys managed to hire their skis without a hitch. We headed off to the resort of Lecherette, got kitted up and hit the nursery slope. There was a range
of skiing abilities on show, with James, Sara and I having skied all of our lives, Stephen finding that skiing was just like riding a bike and picking up where he left off over a decade earlier, Sarah picked up her skiing again pretty sharply and Nigel's array of bruises paid testament to the fact that skiing can be a frustrating and painful pastime - although by the end of the week he would be whizzing down the black runs like a seasoned pro!
Despite the array of differing speeds and styles that were on show everyone had a lot of fun, and Steve who I was skiing with, had be restrained from taking on the black run before lunchtime on the first day - he soon conquered it in the afternoon though!
We soon developed into a hugely enjoyable routine of skiing or perhaps tobogganing by day, and enjoying plenty of wine, board games and the odd film by night. Steve also discovered a huge passion for shops - it didn't seem to matter what type it was but every journey home from the slopes was punctuated by at least one stop at a local establishment! We
also tucked into Swiss cheese in a massive way with us bringing back slabs of it freshly cut to enjoy on our hungry return from the slopes!
On the third day Sara, James, Steve and I as the more experienced skiers in the group decided to have a morning of skiing at the chalet's village resort of Moleson. Moleson contains a couple of blue runs as well as a black run that is probably the most challenging I have ever come across. Somehow I let this slip when describing the slope to Steve and managed to convince him that he should give it a go. I also managed to forget to let him know that the toughest section that I had warned him about - a narrow section that was reasonably steep and had safety nets on one side to stop you plummeting down the sheer drop also had an additional sting in the tail, as this steep narrow section also happened to be a mogul slope - something Steve had never encountered before. Steve gallantly negotiated the slope with a style that may not have been pretty but certainly was effective, but I don't think that my excuse
The easy part of the Moleson black run!!
The moguls were still to come - sorry Steve!of “Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that there were moguls there” quite placated him! Sorry mate!
We managed to intersperse our skiing and cheese eating with a visit to Gruyeres castle (the village is home of the famous Swiss cheese of the same name) for a look round the medieval walled city and a trip to the H.R.Giger bar. Giger is the surrealist artist probably most famous for inspiring the visuals in the film Alien. The bar was sculpted in the same fantastic way and the bar stools were quite something to behold!
Steve had to leave us on Thursday morning to return to England for a Butlins 80's weekender, but we managed to get an awful lot of good skiing in during those four days, both as a group and also splitting off individually and in pairs. At the resort of Charmey we found a long sunny blue run that was suitable for everyone and had a lot of fun heading down there as a group. My sister especially enjoyed laughing at me as I bounced my way over rows of moguls parallel to the main slope and then decided to tackle some deep snow to the side
of the piste and found myself coming off second best and face planting spectacularly!!
On our final day of skiing we headed across to Les Mosses, and here Nigel had improved so much that he was taking on the reds and even the blacks with no problem at all. James and I were really enjoying the Les Mosses black run, especially as half way down the slope it broke away into a jump park - something I had never tackled before but was very keen to give a go. After several runs up and down, getting bigger and bigger air off the jumps each time I was feeling massively confident. James' lift pass had run out by this point and so I was on my own taking on the big jumps. Unfortunately my confidence was perhaps a little unfounded and I got so much speed and air off the biggest jump in the park that I flew over the landing down-slope and eventually touched down on a small up-slope. The impact was too much for one of my skis which came flying off and this catapulted me into the air at which point I face planted again and decided
to use my forehead and my right ear as the braking method to bring me to a halt. Ouchy! It seemed I had found my limit, gone beyond it and perhaps needed to back things off a little next time around!
The road trip back was again blessed with great weather, and we decided to take the cross country route as far as Dijon which proved to be a lot more fun that trundling along the motorway. We again made steady progress and reached our destination of Lille in the evening. The map in the back of my 99p French Atlas showed a very exciting looking hexagon near the historic centre, but no explanation of what it was. A castle, perhaps a fort, we reckoned. So we plugged the details into Nigel's TomTom to find ourselves in the centre of a giant hexagonal.....car park. Never mind!
We then headed into the centre of Historic Lille and tracked down a restaurant to celebrate our last night together on the trip. The next morning we took the cross country back roads to Dunkerque, managing to stop off for coffee and Pain au Chocolate at a beautiful cobble-stoned town that we
happened across before visiting the beaches at Flanders and jumping on board our ferry.
The trip had been an absolute blast, with top eating, some great wine and cheese, some crazy board games and most of all great company and the chance to go skiing again. Hopefully we can do it all again next winter. Thanks a million guys.
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