Jul/090
Mountain Goats
I was down in Argentiere this morning. It's the next village down and has a small supermarket, but it's still a small village. It was busier than I've ever seen it. Turns out there was a market going on, and penned in by the church were a couple of hundred goats and sheep.
I was so tempted to buy a couple of goats. They look like cool animals to have around, keeping the grass down all summer and perhaps providing milk I could make cheese from. Aside from the many more obvious reasons for not buying a couple of goats, the reason which fully made up my mind was wondering how I would explain to them the difference between my vegetable garden and the grass they were allowed to eat.
Shame. I'd love to have seen how my cat would get on with a couple of goats too. Would she be the boss even though she's less than a quarter of their size?
Apr/090
Rifugio Guglielmina (mountain refuge)
Spring marches on at pace, melting all the snow and bringing out the shorts and T-Shirts. But the skiing is in it's final flourishes. Last week a I went over to Alagna, Italy with a group of friends. It takes a few hours to drive: through the Mount Blanc tunnel and down into the Italian Aosta. So we bought a half day's ski pass and had a great afternoon booting around in the slush, getting our bearings. But instead of skiing down at the end of the day, weskied over to the Guglielmina refuge and stayed there for the night. It was stunning. As good as the Bonatti Hut I stayed in a few summers ago. 50 bucks for accommodation, dinner and breakfast seemed a bargain for the experience.
Due in equal measure to the amount of wine we'd all managed to consume the previous day and the inclement weather we shelved the plans to go touring the next day, hung around by the fire for a while in the morning before skiing back down to the valley floor and heading home. There's probably loads of these refuges to stay in all over the alps, and I'm going to make a point of finding and staying in the nicest ones.
Nov/080
The reality of winter
The promised snow storm arrived yesterday. Shed-loads of snow. 50cm at least in my back garden. It was a bit of a race for me to get down the valley to Carrefour to do a big food shop before I got snowed in. A race I lost in fact. My van (which is full of office furniture) got stuck on the road from Argentiere to Le Tour and I had to put the chains on just to get home. I'm rubbish at putting chains on, it's a dirty horrible business which you invariably do at the side of the road, inappropriately dressed in a snow storm. But I got home in time to cook a meal for my first dinner guests.
The reality of living in Le Tour - officially the snowiest village in the French Alps - is sinking in. This is what my van looked like this morning.
So rather than digging it out, I thought I'd ski down to Argentiere instead. It didn't take long. It's around 5km and gravity was on my side. The buses are running, so I didn't even have to skin back up, which I think would have tested my enthusiasm a little. As the first ski of the season it was an unusual one. I didn't get many turns in - only when I got to a stretch of road with a nice flattened covering. At that point I even overtook a struggling van. Chuckling as I did so I might add. Skiing began as a mode of transport & today it proved to be the best form of transport available to me. That and the bus for getting back up the hill.