Onwards and Upwards

It's been an interesting few days. That's interesting in the ancient Chinese proverbial sense. John managed to find replacements and, not wasting any time, they (well, half of "they" anyway) arrived on Monday night. We spent Saturday and Sunday reviving the chalet after two weeks worth of guests. Monday morning we spent extracting ourselves from the Ferme and then driving around the resort looking for accomodation, which is very tricky mid-way through the season.

It was made even trickier by the fact that all the descriptions and locations were in French. Also, some of the "descriptions" consisted purely of the location of the apartment and a phone number with no other details whatsoever.

John came to the rescue with a group mail to all the owners in the area and we found a perfect apartment in the village of Le Levanchy, in Montriond. The vital statistics are:

1) Seven minutes from the main slopes. Awesome.
2) WiFi. Awesome.

Oh yeah, and it's got a kitchen, dining, bedroom (sleeping 4), and bathroom with a fabulous shower. What more could you ask for. From where i'm now sitting, if it wasn't pitch black outside, i could see the top of the Chaux Fleurie chair-lift. We'll take our own, but this site has some photos of our place. The top photo on this page is the view from our apartment window which is pretty much exactly what it looked like today, given that we had a whiteout.

It seems there's plenty of work going and we've managed to pick up some of that. So provided we can successfully juggle the desire to ski with the need to earn money to eat food, things are looking pretty good.

It was great today to have time to ourselves for the first time in over a month where we didn't need to rush anywhere or have 13 hungry people stalking past the kitchen to check on progress and make some or other demand or complaint. It was also fairly pleasing not to spend 6 hours driving around the resort looking at but not skiing on the slopes or waiting for guests who were very late and even more unapologetic for the nth day in a row "because the lift queues were too long". Fear not, Morrice's and Tomlinson's, i'm referring to our New Year guests, who don't have this link. You guys were great and we really missed you the following week!

i will not miss chalet work, and i'm very happy things seem to be working out for John and Allez Alps. i think Natalie and i have made the right decision.