CLUB . . . You're wrong and you don't even know it !

Following my painful adventures on the slopes the day before I had left my board in the shop in town in a fit of disgust and spent the evening drinking wine and listening to a lot of well meant but utterly unitelligble advice from the pro-boarding squad at the chalet. I had decided I needed lessons before I ever set board on a mountain again.

Getting up wasn't easy, my neck felt like it had been in one of Grants car accidents and my limbs and shoulders felt like they had been continually dropped from 6ft onto ice for most of the preceding day. I didn't so much get up as roll off the bed onto the floor and then climb up the furniture into a standing position.

I staggered through breakfast and a quick shower and left for the town reasonably early in the mid-morning/afternoon sometime. Everyone else had already lept out of bed and dashed off for bags more pro-boarding action at the Point De Nyon whilst I was still attempting to puzzle out the correlation between moving my head and deep agonizing pain.

It was snowing so the 40 minute walk into town was nice, instinctively I had left my snowboarding boots back at the chalet almost as if I knew that whatever lessons I could find would not be taking place today.

Midweek is apparently the worst time to try and find snowboarding lessons, all the nice cheap group lessons are booked up and even the personal one on one instructors are booked solidly. Luckily I managed to secure the services of Sebastian who I was to meet at the top of the Pleney Cable Car the next afternoon for 2 hours of intensive instruction.

I spent the rest of the day buying more warm clothes and watching the snow which was becoming heavier and heavier.

I breezed back to the chalet just after the first wave of my pro boarding brethren had staggered back in off the mountain and were lying around the lounge in heaps groaning and babbling incoherently. The second wave phoned from the Pleney lift and asked if someone could come and pick them up since they'd ended up on a different part of the mountain to the one they thought they were on.

The only designated driver was Caroline and as the only person not lying around groaning and had just come from the Pleney lift I became the designated navigator.

It was now snowing very heavily indeed and the road had become covered in a fairly thick snowy blanket. I don't think Caroline likes driving in the snow very much, especially at night, in a foreign country and when it's the first time she's driven the car. I did my best to be reassuring and positive but unfortunatley I spent too much time saying things like "Yes, yes ! Excellently taken shallow bend there, we're doing OK. We're going to live !" and not enough time navigating with the inevitable result that we got lost somewhere in the town centre and nowhere near the Pleney Cable Car.

After a few half hearted attempts to negotiate the one way system and actually look at the map we gave up, parked the van and rang the others to tell them they'd have to walk down and look for us. I thought a little extra excercise carrying their boards and walking around in their boarding boots would do them the world of good and settled back with a welcome cigarette in the nice warm van for the long wait until they arrived.

In the meantime it was fun watching the snow which was now extremely heavy and rapidly burying the town centre, cars, people and buildings. After probably half an hour or so the others finally arrived and we set off back to the chalet for some tea.

We went out in the evening for Crepes it being Pancake day and managed to find a Creperie with the slowest imaginable service, a rather dodgy pub and the most expensive taxi in the world. The journey from the chalet back to town was around 5 mins in a taxi and for the trip there and back the driver wanted to charge us around 70 Euros despite the fact the same journey ( one way ) had only cost me 12 Euros earlier in the day.