Wow, we had a glorious last day of skiing. We woke up this morning to snow falling: fat, heavy flakes. We were on the slopes by 10 am, which is later than I’d like but realistic with a big family.
Eric dropped us off and spent his morning doing some work and checking out a “check engine” light that just went on. He went to several mechanics and called a number of other places, and no one could even look at it. He finally went back to a mechanic close to us and convinced him to just take a look and see if it was something serious. Turns out it’s not; it has something to do with the glow plugs that heat up the engine when it starts. So we’re cleared to drive home tomorrow.
Meanwhile we were reveling in the fresh, deep powder all over the resort. The day of a snowfall, the resort doesn’t groom the slopes, so it was paradise to ski in. Our visibility was extremely limited until mid-afternoon since we were in a dense cloud. Snow continued to fall until well after lunchtime.
We did a blue run a few times to get Ivy confident, then we did the long lower run "Pierre à Ric." Besides the fact that we couldn’t see very far in front of us and couldn’t see any bumps on the hills—everything was a blank white—it was great. We had to go slowly since we had no idea when we were hitting a bump or a dip or a flat part. But so much fun!
Eric met us for lunch at the bottom, then we all went up. We did the long low run again and a few shorter runs at the top base, and then we headed up to the very highest run: Bochard. We spent most of our time “hors-piste” (backcountry) in the deep powder. This is the first time I’ve ever figured out how to ski in deep powder. I haven’t had very many occasions to ski in it, and when I’ve tried previously, I never could do it. I finally got it!
We probably did one too many runs for Ivy. On the very last one, she refused to go down, cried, and kept asking me to “wait.” She couldn’t be reasoned with. She wasn’t scared—she was just done. I could tell she was exhausted, but she screamed “I’m NOT TIRED!” when I said something about her being tired. In retrospect we should have just had one of us go back down the gondola with her. So slowly and painfully we got her down from the very top to the very bottom on two long runs.
And that was it! 6 days of some of the best skiing I’ve ever had. We definitely like Les Grands Montets the best of any of the Chamonix resorts. Better snow, longer runs, higher altitudes, and new lifts/gondolas. You can ski __ vertical meters without stopping! And that’s not even counting the very highest lift, which is temporarily closed (but that’s all off-run skiing and only for experts).
As I'm typing, the kids are playing French Scrabble with Eric. I’ve been packing up our suitcase, making sure our snow clothes are drying on the radiators, and going through the leftovers in the fridge. I did a final load of handwashed laundry, just enough to get us home. I’m annoyed that this apartment advertised that it had a washing machine and wifi, and neither really turned out to be true. Yes, technically there’s a washing machine in the building but it can only be used from 8 am-noon on weekdays, which means you have to miss a half-day of skiing to do laundry. And yes technically there was wifi, but only 1 GB of data and after that you have to pay 50 Euros per additional GB. We burned through our 1 GB that in less than 24 hours, and that was with us being gone skiing during the day. The owner is an older woman and I don’t think she has a realistic idea of internet usage.
But we love that this place is so close to the resort and that we can walk right out our dining room door to play in the snow. It’s also the smallest apartment we’ve ever stayed in as a family. It has one bedroom with a double bed plus a trundle bed in the living room that doubles as a couch. They had 2 thin spare mattress pads for the other 2 kids. But yeah, it was tight!
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