How not to drive

When you're entering a roundabout, particularly one that is egg-shaped and covered in snow and ice, what you don't want to do is leave the roundabout at speed, narrowly miss (or indeed scrape) a lamp post, and then head face-first down a 3m deep ditch and then smash into a 1m drainage trench at the bottom of the ditch. You don't want to do this because your wife will then spend half an hour on the phone to the RAC while you try and figure out what full diff-lock actually does and then try and fit snow chains to the front tyres that are buried in snow and mud.

Unfortunately, no one gave me this advice before we set off for my parents' house last Wednesday so of course, this is exactly what I did. So it turns out that the Touareg is not as invincible as I thought. About five minutes from my parents' house at about midnight on the 23rd while we were going round the point of the egg-shaped roundabout I put the front-left tyre on the snow that was gathering at the edge of the lane that everyone else had been following and from that point on I was a dumbfounded passenger. Somehow I avoided hitting the lamp post head-on but as a result of this, ended up pointing straight down the ditch and then thumping into a trench at the bottom of that ditch.

The good news is that we are ok. Scarlett barely even woke up and actually, if you're going to have a crash, I can highly recommend the VW Touareg to have one in - very comfortable. The car is not ok and is still in England as I sit here typing this from our new chalet in Essert Romand in the Portes du Soleil. My dad has very kindly volunteered to drive it out to France for us when it's fixed.

At this point I would like to thank the anonymous saviour in his Freelander I that saved us from the ditch! After thirty minutes the RAC had not even picked up the phone yet and we were seriously looking at abandoning our heavily laden Touareg in said ditch. Extremely luckily for us, this amazingly kind gentleman had the right car, the right tow-rope and the right attitude to haul our 3-ton behemoth our of the mud. Thank you sir! You wouldn't leave us your name and number but we remain extremely grateful that you helped us!

So actually, given that we were rescued, unhurt and then Natalie and I then got to drive out to France together (rather than in convoy), and my parents now have a very good excuse to come and visit us, things haven't worked out too badly really.

Anyway, so we're here. We're safe. The Phils, Sally and Simon and their entourage have arrived and we're looking forward to an excellent new year here in France!

Chapitre Deux!

Google Readers all over the world have just lit up in amazement at the new posting on possibly the finest blog known at this URL.

Yes indeed. Natalie and I are returning to les Alpes Francais (in the next couple of days) and I thought it was high time to fire up the old blog and watch my addicted fanbase flock back to their favourite morning read.

The world 'delusional' comes to mind.

Anyway, so, in a nutshell, or actually, more accurately, a paragraph, we are returning to the Alps on the 27th and 28th of December 2009 and we'll be living in Essert Romand, which is quite possibly the nicest village in the whole of the Portes du Soleil. I've got a contract in Geneva which starts in January and we've rented a spectacularly awesome chalet for the year.

More on this later. Right now we have a house to pack!

The End (of this chapter)

Blogs don't usually have an ending. The same way that Coronation Street would never, unfortunately, have a final episode where, say for example, the entire street was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. We can live in hope though.

Anyway so you may have, if you've been religiously checking this page every day, noticed that i've stopped writing. No new entries since April. Also, if you've been paying attention, you've realised that we're sadly no longer in the Alps.

You can't have too many Alpine adventures if you're not actually in the Alps. So therefore, since we're now home, i've started a new blog (for now) to chronicle our life and times in the fine City of London. There's all sorts of new things going on, which some of you may be aware of, and i'm planning on writing some of it down.

So, if you wouldn't mind, please adjust your set.

Harrie's Pancakes

Today we enjoyed arguably the world's finest pancakes at Harrie's at the Waterfront in Cape Town.  The "cold" front continues with temperatures in the mid-twenties and an abundance of sunshine.

Tomorrow is one of South Africa's seemingly unlimited number of public holidays and we plan to go buy new wetsuites and try them out in the freezing Atlantic.

Cape Cold Front

Supposedly there's a cold front in Cape Town.  This must be why i'm walking around in a T-shirt and it rained for less than one hour today.  Oh, and we did see some clouds.

But other than that the weather here is as gorgeous as ever.  Natalie and i are currently staying with Natalie's mother in Hout Bay and generally we are doing as little as possible.

The Days are just Packed

Today we've seen three countries, four large lakes, two blizzards, four mountain passes, traveled for 6 hours by car and 1 by train, driven over mountains and under them, and finally gone skiing for 2 hours.

So this is just a quick entry to say that we're back in France, managed to get here fast enough to ski this afternoon.  We took a really interesting route through the Bergamese Alps to Valais in Switzerland to get here.  In another post i'll log the route because i'd recommend it.

Anyway, this was Natalie about 2 hours ago.

And yes, the mountains here are still gorgeous.  Pretty good powder today too.

Bellagio

We've spent the last two days exploring Lago di Como in the area surrounding Lenno.  Our apartment is very close to the place where they filmed the "recovery" scene in Casino Royale.

For those that don't remember, he was recovering from being shot at, attacked by a man with a machete, falling down several flights of stairs, being poisoned and his heart consequently stopping and needing to be restarting by electrocution, involved in a serious high-speed 9-roll car crash, and finally being cruelly tortured.

Go on, go watch Casino Royale and see if you can place the above scene.

This is a pretty good place to recover, but nowhere near Montenegro, or even the Czech Republic where it was shot, so it's interesting that they brought him all the way here.  Hollywood geography is fantastic, you can just do whatever you want.  After leaving here they're suddenly on a yacht arriving in Venezia.  However,  you'd have to leave from Venezia to get out into the Adriatic anyway,  unless they sailed around the whole of Italy, which i'd imagine would take some time.

Anyway, Hollywood fantasy aside, the Villa Balbianello, where Jimmy Bond recovered, is rather splendid and it's gardens immaculate.  In the afternoon yesterday we took the tiny cable-car (funivia in Italian) to Pigra and got an elevated view of the lake.

Today we were off to Bellagio, which is apparently the number one destination to visit in the whole of the lakes area.  According to Shelley it's not only the best in Lombardy, but also the best in the world.  Don't get me wrong, it was a cute place alright, but perhaps Shelley needed to get out more?

On a bench in Bellagio.  Was this description really necessary?

The lakes are certainly relaxing and there's plenty to see.  i'm getting intense ski-withdrawal though, and keep thinking, when i see these perfectly landscaped gardens, about how i would ski them if they were covered in snow.

Tomorrow we're going to look at an Italian market in Argegno and then wander round Mennaggio in the afternoon.