 Poster: A snowHead
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So, to avoid any accusation of me trying too hard to actually go skiing, and the weather helping significantly in my pursuit of going for a whole bunch of lunch in any given holiday, a bit of a trip report with some lunches thrown in.
We turn up at Heathrow to find our flight delayed. No bother, we are on a lunchtime flight so that means time for a more relaxed lunch. We hit the Giraffe cafe, which still manages to throw together a schnitzel and a beer for a whole lot of money but it tasted ok. Nobody seemed to have a better lunch than I did, and other than the ridiculous cut down knives and forks it was nice enough.
Down to the gate, and we are the last people onto the plane. Who knows how that happened, but basically everyone else seemed to have more of an eye on the boards than I did while we ate lunch. Not too bad, they were queueing in the magic portal snake thingy so we didn't have to do the walk of shame down the aisle. We board to see various SHs around the place, like the beginning of Con Air when you realise that something is quite obviously going to go disasterously wrong within only a few hours...
Swiss once again manage a level of comfort, understanding of skiiers needs (like 40kg of baggage each) and level of customer service that most operators running £100 return to Geneva flights couldn't dream of. I have no idea why this is, but they must be making money somewhere.
We got on the bus, we drank some baileys, there was a fairly lengthy discussion about a pissette. I still don't really understand what one of those is.
Day one, and we wake up to a whole lot of cloud and a whole lot of snow. Cloud is good, because it makes everyone's legs tired, which means they want to go for lunch at 12 o'clock, which is good. We hit the Taverne des Neiges at the bottom of the Funicular and Bollin, to discover that Admin has done a deal that gets us free drinks and stuff. I go for a pizza, which is not the best choice at the table. The Tarftiflette is better, and I subsequently discover that the Croque Monsieur is also better and cheaper and comes with chips. Mmmmmmmmmm. Pommes Frites......
Unfortunately everyone remains upbeat despite the visibility, because it is the first day, so my afternoon snooze is significantly curtailed to about 3 hours by skiing until after 4pm. We opt for the later dinner though, a good move for additional snoozing and also avoids the effects of drinking from 8pm to some time in the morning. Sadly we manage drinking from 9:30 until some time in the evening, as always everyone overdoes it on the first night.
Day two is looking good though, everyone has a little bit of a hangover, and the cloud is still around. An early lunch is very much on the cards, and on the further positive side we sleep in a bit until after 9am. That lets the dead keen enthusiastic lot wear their legs out a bit for the first half an hour or so, and soon we are off and going. Not many lifts open, largely because it was chuffing windy, there was loads of snow coming down, but also because I believe the lift operators were trying to keep me away from the other places to go for lunch. In a fit of predictability, we headed back to the Taverne de Neige, and finally hit the jackpot with a nice Croque and a pint of coke. Legs now starting to hurt within an hour of starting skiing, so luckily we kept the skiing down to about 2hrs before and after lunch.
Everyone much more subdued in the bar, which was ok because we all needed to catch up on sleep. We managed to catch up on really quite a lot of sleep by looking out of the window in the morning, seeing a bunch of cloud, and sleeping in until 2pm. Nice. Can't beat a lie-in. That didn't stop us from getting in a couple of hours of skiing in the afternoon, for some reason we missed lunch and I ended up with an undercooked crepe on the way home - a crime that I didn't believe possible in France, but somehow they managed it.
Day four looked much more promising on the food front as lifts started to open. That meant access to more restaurants, so we headed into Tignes Le Lac and next to the Palafour we headed up the road to the Marmot Pub. This was previously a reasonable place to get a pizza, but somehow the place has either changed hands or just changed menu, and we considered our options on realising it was pretty much burgers or nothing. But we had sat down. We were tired. There was a lot of snow outside. So we stayed, despite my distinctly unenthusiastic view of burgers. I opted for a chicken burger. Mrs M had a burger. Rob had one too. None of us could finish it. It was one of the best burgers of all time. The buns were great. The wedges were good. The burgers were juicy and topped with lots of good stuff. Go there. Eat the burgers. Remember to wear elasticated trousers. Blimey.
More drinking, more snoozing, some getting up fairly early in the morning, and some more skiing went on. All in a days work for the now battle hardened zero vis skiiers we had become, but then from nowhere, like on the road to Damascus, the sun shone. Out came the light, showing us the way, the path to snow and happiness was clear. Everyone overdid it significantly, exhausted themselves quite a bit, and I think we ended up back at the Taverne de Neige, but I can't really remember. That might have been the day I went for my second croque, but who really knows. The sun was shining, and we were like excitable children on Xmas day.
The last day of the trip, and the snow was back. This was now officially more snow than I've ever seen in a week, including when we got snowed in last December in VT. I regretted my choice of comfortable shoes, rejecting the idea that I'd need snow boots because they'd clear all the paths. We did some skiing, but the lift choices were fairly limited. We pootled about, we were all set for the Taverne again, but then a bus arrived. We thought about it, for about 10 seconds, and everyone else went and jumped on the bus. We were off again to Le Lac for lunch, and I was not complaining.
The first idea was to go back for burgers, because two of the group had not experienced them the first time. But no, the pub was busy. We carried on walking up the hill a bit, and went up the little wooden steps to the first restaurant on the left. And it is a good thing we did. We found a nice restaurant, with friendly staff, serving a range of pizza, pasta and other stuff. Mrs M had the Coziflette, a pasta version of a Tartiflette with a big sausage on top, I had the "XXL Pasta" dish, which was just about enough food, and the pizza looked good across the table too. Definitely worth eating there too, less food than the pub, but decent value and a good relaxed place to eat for an hour.
We got home, via the Merles lift which was utterly freezing and windy, down into town with about 30 other SHs, packed up the stuff and were ready to go home. At dinner I was given a delightful superman outfit for some reason (XXL) and two birthday cakes which were so rich that the 20-odd people in the room couldn't even eat one of them. We managed most of the other one in Geneva airport, right after grabbing a weird pizza from Oliviers while the return flight was a bit delayed and everyone was queueing for an hour at security.
Thanks to admin for organising, various other people for helping with various other stuff, Mrs M for carting birthday presents hundreds of miles across Europe, the cake shop next door for making two deceptively filling cakes, and the weather gods for giving in to my request for rather a lot of snow, unfortunately they went a bit overboard, but rather too much than too little at this time of year 
Roll on the EOSB which will be the next time we'll see you lot for a bash, and we might even make it to Mount Hemel at the weekend for a beer. For anyone that hasn't signed up for a trip with SHs, it is the best value out there (believe me, I've shopped around and it really is) with a good group of people who are almost all internet weirdos but in a nice way.
Mr M.
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