UCPA Chamonix 2013 day 2 – Le Tour

Less of a faff this morning as I knew the score. I made my packed lunch before I got my breakfast, so things hadn’t run out, it was a good plan as there was dark chocolate sweets that had all gone the previous morning!

I met my group at the number six sign out front. There were two English girls in the group and 9 others (French, Swedish and Dutch). We took the UCPA bus up to Le Tour and spent the morning sorting out the groups to make sure we were equally matched level wise. I had booked onto the advanced on piste week as I wanted to push my skiing to another level. I didn’t feel the group I was in would be doing that, but as the instructor said, the first day was a bit slower so he could assess each of our levels.

We spent the morning skiing the front of Le Tour and stopped for lunch about 12 for 45mins. Then we went over to Vallorcine for the afternoon and skied red and blue runs. Our instructor was critiquing our skiing technique and we were doing skills and drills. His main point for me was that I skied with my feet too close together, which he said was “old school”, and the style of skiing had now changed. We also tried a small mogul field, which was fun. (I had hire boots which were a bit too big for me and I felt it was affecting how well I skied, aside from the fact they had given my boney feet blisters already…)

It was a complete white out for most of the day with light snow showers (great that fresh snow was falling, as there were a few icy patches still), so the visibility was about 10 meters or so, which made things interesting. We skied till 3:30 when we all got the UCPA bus back to Chamonix. We had a cup of tea and a meeting with our instructor to go over the weeks plans and chat about what we each (we were 9 now) wanted to get out of the week.

I took a walk to the pharmacy for blister plasters… and got a bottle of wine to go with the cheese at dinner time. It was nice walking around Chamonix town again, it has such good memories for me of many happy family trips! I bumped into my roommate Ann-Sophie and we went for a beer before heading back to UCPA for dinner.

Dinner was another buffet feast! The main course was a melt in your mouth lamb, with cous cous and vegetables. The wine went wry well with dinner and the cheese!

It was still snowing when I went to bed! A good sign for tomorrow.