Ski week
Our family has done a lot of skiing. Desmond was a ski racer, which meant that he needed to be in the mountains between two and four days a week during ski season. It also meant that both girls, as babies, spent their weekends in ski lodges and that they started skiing while still in diapers. When each girl turned five, they joined the race club and the during the winter before we came to France they were skiing six-hour days on Saturdays and Sundays every weekend.
All that being said, I admit that I am not a big fan of skiing. I learned to ski when Desmond first started and although I have logged many, many hours at the hills, I have always had a greater appreciation for après-ski than for braving the cold and the slopes. When H said that one of his bucket list items during the sabbatical year was to have a European ski vacation, I was not bubbling over with enthusiasm. I was supportive though, for a number of reasons: I know H really loves skiing; I had heard that European skiing is very different from North American and I was curious to experience the difference, and; the girls were excited to get a fix of “real snow” and test their ski legs. Looking forward to French style après-ski also helped fuel my enthusiasm.
Talk of where to go started in earnest in October when we were told that if we planned to ski in February, we’d better book a place now. We talked to French families to find out where they were going. We heard names like Val d’Isère, Courchevel, Méribel and Chamonix. Some families preferred large resorts while others recommended small, quaint family focused options. People were renting chalets or apartments, on the hill and off. It was all quite overwhelming and we felt pressured for time. H stayed up late at night to read about different options and their pluses and minuses. You could choose something with higher or lower altitude: at the higher altitude there was a risk of colder weather (my worst nightmare) but at the lower there was a chance that there would not be enough snow.
Ultimately we relied on a recommendation from my well-travelled sister-in-law who had loved their family trip to Tignes when they were living in Europe. We booked the last available family suite in the hotel Levanna and felt relief to have secured our spot. It was too early to book train tickets so I set an alert to have SNCF message me as soon as they were ready. When I received the text I went online ASAP and already the earliest trains were “complet”. I raced to get the last non-adjoining seats on a train from Paris to Bourg-Saint Maurice leaving at 9AM on a Saturday morning. Necessary tasks completed, we put the ski holiday on the back burner until after Christmas.
It was not until February that we started thinking about the holidays again. The hotel emailed us to ask what we wanted for ski passes and gear and then arranged it all for us so that we only needed to show up. We took an inventory of what clothing we had brought with us and made a trip to Decathalon, the French sporting goods store that is similar to Mountain Equipment Co-op in Canada, but even more affordable and more ubiquitous. We bought goggles, ski long underwear for the girls, ski buffs for all, mitts for me and a ski jacket for Sophia for around 250 euro. This counted as one of the few bargains we have found in Paris.
On the day of departure we took a taxi to the Gare de Lyon. Normally we rely on the metro but we were travelling a little heavier than usual with two large suitcases that we didn’t want to carry up and down the metro stairs. We had heard nightmares about how busy it was going to be: people who were driving to the hills expected a five hour drive to take ten hours; they expected massive queues for renting their gear and buying their food at the grocery stores. I thought we should get to the train station a little earlier than usual, just in case. What we learned is that getting to a train station early is not really helpful because they announce the platform just as the train is ready to board. You end up waiting but not necessarily is a good position because you don’t know where you will ultimately need to be. The early arrival gave us time to buy a perfect train breakfast: croissants and pain au chocolats from the Pierre Hermé kiosk. I had packed a picnic lunch to enjoy on the six-hour journey so we would not need to buy food on the train. We have found the train food to be overpriced and not very good, with the exception of the single serving bottles of wine which are quite lovely on an afternoon ride.
The train was full to bursting. Every seat was taken and luggage was stacked everywhere it was allowed to be and a lot of places that it wasn’t. H and I were sitting separately and were able to spend the journey looking out the window and working on, in my case, French and, in his case, studying his medical textbooks. The girls shared two facing seats and an iPad but they were also drawn into the scenery, which, once out of Paris, looked just like home with fields in the forefront and snow-topped mountains in the distance.
Arriving in the mountain town of Bourg Saint Maurice, we took a twisty 30 minute taxi ride to the hotel, got settled into our family suite with a cute little loft space for the girls, picked up our ski gear and lift passes and then toured around the mountain resort. Our fears of crowds and queues were for naught: everything was smooth and we didn’t have to stand in line for more than a few moments. It was fun to watch the girls get excited about the snow. They have missed snow this winter, a concept that I struggle to understand, and they lit up at the sight of it, running, jumping and sliding.
The week of skiing exceeded my expectations in every possible way. It seems that most French children enrol in the ski schools to work on achieving their “étoiles”. They spend a morning or an afternoon with an instructor and on Friday complete a test to see if they can move to the next level. Children come back year after year to move through the system. I encouraged the girls to enrol, thinking it would be good for their French. Ultimately, we decided not to participate in any formal programming and just ski together. It meant that we could have breakfast when we wanted, head out to the slopes directly from the hotel when we wanted and not have to worry about start times, lunch times or pick up times. Coming from the structured race club life we were used to, it was such a gift to approach skiing as pure recreation.
The resort was enormous: 2 glaciers, 300 km of slopes with 159 runs and a vertical drop of 1900 metres. We were worried about getting lost, or worse, losing one of the girls. We put our hotel and personal phone numbers in their pockets and hoped for the best.
It was so warm that we needed none of the cold weather gear we had brought with us. Sophia skied in just a windbreaker and I wore a light puffy that was my warming layer back home. Each day we had bluebird, clear skies. Lunches were outside at one of the mountainside restaurants of which there were many. Two days we brought up a small picnic and ate on the exposed rocks looking over the vast expanse of mountains. One day we went to the summit: la Grande Motte at 3546m. Getting there required a series of chair lifts and gondolas, eventually loading into a téléphérique, a cable car that can take 100 people to the top of the mountain, gaining 400 m in altitude and travelling two kilometres in five minutes. The run, Génépy, from the summit to the base was 20 km of the most enjoyable skiing I have ever done. Another day, H, our fearless guide, led us from the Tignes resort to the neighbouring Val d’Isère. It took us a full day to ski from one resort to the other and back. Navigating, sight seeing and skiing at the same time was a new experience and we were rewarded with our first sightings of trees (Tignes is above the tree line), lovely rest stops, and literally skiing through the charming ski village of Val d’Isere. The lift line-ups were sometimes long but large and fast moving chair lifts meant they moved very quickly. Some of the runs were extremely busy but we found that if we stuck to the red or black runs (in France the progression of runs goes from green to blue to red to black) we had lots of space.
I had made restaurant reservations for us a couple of weeks before we arrived at the resort. After asking the hotel for suggestions I booked us into each of the three places they recommended. Our first night was at La Ferme des Trois Capucines, a warm, character filled restaurant completely off the beaten path and serving fondue and raclette with their own cheeses produced on their farm. We tried fondue for the first time as a family and found something new that all of us could enjoy together. Another night we went to Coeur des Neiges, which was cool because the girls got to sit in an upcycled ski lift chair. The third restaurant turned into a bit of an adventure.
We showed up at La Table de Jeanne on the last night of our holiday for an 8PM reservation. It was our latest dinner but since we weren’t skiing the next day we thought it would be fine. We walked across a frozen lake in falling snow to get to the cosy, tucked away little restaurant that looked as if it had been there for 100 years. The bad news: they told us we did not have a reservation. I insisted that I had called and made a reservation for 8PM that night. They were very apologetic and offered that we could sit in their cozy lounge space, wait until 9PM and they would get us a table. They offered us a free charcuterie board to tide us over. The girls were exhausted and disappointed not be sitting down right away. We settled into our waiting spot and ordered some drinks. They offered us a menu so we could be ready to order. I took a look at the menu and thought, “this is not the menu that I looked at online”. Saying nothing, I subtly looked up the restaurant on my phone to compare the menus. It was then that I realised that the restaurant that I had booked was not in Tignes but in a town called Pavilly. When I confessed to my family what I had done, H confirmed that the place we were supposed to be at was 600km away.
It was at that moment that the server delivered us the enormous charcuterie board they were offering us because of their mistake. Feeling awkward but not wanting to confess, we accepted the food. We didn’t want to appear ungracious by not eating it but neither I nor the girls are huge eaters of cured meats so H was “obliged” to eat his weight in meat. Thankfully, he said it was the best charcuterie he had ever had. Sophia and I pitched in a little and I did enjoy the saucisson, a french specialty and a regular during l’apero, but my turn came when we finally sat down at our table at 9PM. By the this point, the girls were exhausted and didn’t feel like eating. H was stuffed with charcuterie. We felt that we needed to order enough food to justify us being there so we chose to share a fondue for two people. When it arrived it looked as though it was enough for four but I did my best to work our way through it with a little help from the others. On the walk back across the frozen lake on the way home, H full of ham, and me full of cheese, my family teased me about my mistake. As I find myself saying to myself all too often this year, “well, I won’t make that mistake again”.
The cold weather rolled in the last day we were in Tignes. Back in Paris for our second week of les vacances, I received constant notices: I still had the Tignes application on my phone and they were sending out alerts warning of high winds, of lifts being closed and of the need to bus people back to their resorts. Had we skied the second week instead of the first, our experience would have been completely different. We would not have been able to go to the summit and overcast skies would have obscured the views. The skiing itself would have been less enjoyable in the colder temperatures and strong winds and we certainly would not have taken lunches, rosé and hot chocolate on the terraces both at the tops of the mountains and the base.
We were grateful for having experienced the French ski week tradition. My expectations for the holiday had been relatively low which made the outcome all the more sweet. We loved the simplicity of travelling by train and not having to worry about traffic or bad roads. We could not have been more fortunate with the weather. The long runs and the scenery took our breath away and the family owned restaurants and Savoy cuisine added an element of luxury. The biggest gift for me though was the discovery that skiing could be fun. Having five days in a row without a program, agenda or obligation was a revelation. I see more ski holidays in our future now, perhaps not immediately in France, but we will add this to the continually growing list of gifts we take home with us to Canada. We have always said we were a “ski family” but it is only now, after experiencing the French “ski week” that I feel it is really true. Next time we go to plan a ski retreat, I’ll be the first one to say, “let’s go”.
