Splinternet!

Hurray!!! We finally got the internet connection up at the Ferme, which is where i am right now.

It's interesting to enter the new year without the feeling of impending doom as work looms on the horizon. Rather, i was happy to see the back of the two weeks of the Retardation Season (Christmas and New Year) where the workload in the chalet was just insane. It's quite weird spending those special days with relatively complete strangers.

It's also quite weird being in the Ferme with no guests. But thankfully the workload should drop off now. We haven't had a second to think in the last three weeks - from renovating the chalet to the insane volume of food to be prepared on Christmas day to the huge number of hours spent driving the guests around and finally to the, let's politely say, boisterous singing of one of our guests on New Years Eve, it's been a very very tiring few weeks.

We've probably been out on the slopes about the same amount of time in the last month than we would normally have on a weeklong ski holiday. And we're never alone, there's always people around and we generally feel like we don't have our own space. For that reason and a few others we asked John if we could please be replaced. Bit of a bombshell for him, but we've got to think that this time away from work is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that we have to make the most of. Unless i can find some way to permanently live in the mountains (and i now know that running a chalet is probably not it - renting them out to others to run might be a consideration but you need a lot of cash for that) then they will remain a holiday destination for now.

So therefore we want to make the most of our time out here - ski as much as we can, relax, do a bit of contracting for various folks back home, and think about where we want to be in the future and plan how we're going to get there. We figured we'd have a lot more time to ourselves out here, but it just isn't panning out that way with the chalet work.

So, what does that mean. Well, it means we have to find our own accomodation. That is fairly tricky, but we're hoping we can rent John and Sheila's apartment in Seytroux which is just down the valley from St Jean d'Aulps about 2km away. Currently it has no electricity - a minor inconvenience we're hoping to work around.

We felt pretty awful letting John down, but it seems he has managed to find two suitable candidates who we've promised to train and we've also made ourselves available for any ad hoc work he may need.

So we're going to stick around now until somewhere round the end of March, then we're planning a big trip - don't know quite where yet, but off to do the serious long-term travelling we've always wanted to before returning to sunny Chertsey in May.

Hopefully i'll get to update this a little more often as well!

Well, after 26 hours of ironing, mopping, scrubbing, and clearing, we've finally got the chalet ready for its next guests, who're coming in just over a week. Will we be looking after them? Will we be being shadowed? Will we be sleeping in a tent at the foot of the Ardent bubble lift?

All these and other questions answered next time, on Channel Davies.