Sunrise over the mountains
Last Saturday we headed off to France for our week of skiing. A fun day of transfers – planes, buses, buses, buses- we arrived in Les Menuires in the 3 Vallees of France. http://www.lesmenuires.com/index_en.php
Very excited to arrive to snow filled mountains. We were staying in a Chalet with 10 other people, we only knew one person so it was a fun week making new friends.
The chalet was really pretty and situated right on the slopes so it was easy to get started every morning. During the week we skied pretty much all of the 3 Vallees, so I saw heaps more that when we were there last time when I was learning to ski. We had amazing sunny and almost warm weather for pretty much the whole week. It didn’t snow all week so by Saturday afternoon on our last day we were skating on thin ice……….
Had a great time in the chalet, each night a different pair made dinner. David and I did Christmas dinner, yummy pork and some BBQ chickens.
David and I did a ski lesson one day and our ski intructor worked us pretty hard but it was also a lot of fun. He took us through some pretty descent jumps, tree runs and a 3 metre vertical drop! Not too many bruises!
On Saturday we headed back to Geneva where we spent the night. Our plan for Sunday was to spend the day sightseeing in Geneva. It is a city we have been through a couple of times but never stopped…. and now we know why. Geneva, especially on a Sunday in Winter when the temp did not get above -1C, is not the worlds most exciting city. We saw most of the main sights within an hour and then nothing else was open – no shops, museums, restaurants – it was like a very pretty ghost town! So we ended up finding a lovely Italian restaurant by the lake and had a great, long lunch.
Too cold (and boring) to do any sightseeing after lunch so we headed back to the airport a couple of hours early to catch our flight back home.
Our plane was ready to go, engines were being warmed up and we started off down the run way. Just as our front wheel left the tarmac, it slammed back down again, the plane breaked really heavily and we skidded to a halt. It all happened pretty quickly but was very scary. Our flight crew were all really shaken and scared too which I think made us realise that something pretty bad had happened. It turned out that just was we were going to take-off one of the planes engines failed. Very glad (and lucky) that it happened on the runway.
So we were escorted off the runway by a whole fleet of fire engines. Once we were off the runway, the firies spent ages checking the breaks – because we stopped so quickly there was a chance that the breaks could catch on fire. By this stage everyone on the plane was having a good laugh about it all and taking photos of the fire engines. So they kept us on the plane for anoth 30mins while they did inspections before escorting us all to a waiting area.
Our flight was cancelled (obviously) and they tried to move people onto different flights out last night or stay in a hotel and fly out the following morning. David and I were at the very end of the queue and didn’t fancy running to try and make a plane that would of gotten us into London around midnight. Instead we took the option to stay in a hotel (paid for by the airline of course) last night and took an early flight tomorrow. Very nice hotel too and it probably cost more that the plane tickets!
We flew out this morning with no more incidents. So it turns out that Geneva can be interesting after all!
Hope everyone had a great Christmas, ate too much and enjoyed hot weather! Happy New Year.
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- Sunrise over the mountains
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- Snow, snow, snow
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- View from the top
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- Modelling my stylish ski wear
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- Our chalet was just behind these trees
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- The village
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- Making the most of secret santa presents
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- Racing with secret santa presents
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- You can buy fireworks at the supermarket so we had our our display on christmas eve. Look closely….
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- View from our chalet
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- Christmas dinner
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- Sun baking
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- Apres ski
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- Dinner on our last night – no more cheese please!
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- Yum
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- Singing keeps you warm
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- Will, Candice, David and I
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- Lets do something silly
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- Getting ready for an exciting day in Geneva
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- Saint-Pierre cathedral
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- Saint-Pierre cathedral
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- All rugged up
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- Not rugged up enough
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- Fire engines!
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- Not so cute fireman
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- Waiting to transfer flighrs
