 Poster: A snowHead
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After a slightly odd set of circumstances, a bit of very early and last minute planning combined, we ended up in Tignes for the second time in a month, after enjoying a week on the PSB in December.
This time we were in Lavachet staying with Ski Olympic, who have previously done a good job of looking after us and being a good balance of affordability and quality, and their chalets always seem to be in a good location.
We arrived at Gatwick at some ungodly hour of the morning, all reports of imminent snow didn’t come true, and after a very average airport breakfast we left for Grenoble. An uneventful flight, during which pretty much everybody slept through most of it, we came out to meet the buses.
Now this is something that many operators don’t think about very much. They assume that if they have enough seats they are ok, regardless of the quality of the bus, legroom, and particularly space for luggage. Not me. I notice these things, because I’ve got to sit on the damned thing for 3 hours, and being uncomfortable for 3 hours is not a nice way to start or end a trip. Luckily Olympic seem to have (either by luck or judgement) got this sorted. We had enough legroom, the bus was clean, the hold on the bus was big enough for all our suitcases and ski bags, and everybody got some more sleep and had space to be comfortable on the bus as a result. Good job Olympic.
The chalet was one we knew from previous trips, two years ago we’d been to the same place. We unloaded our gear only to find that various bags had been unloaded at the previous stop and not been loaded back onto the bus. No idea why, no idea how. A bit worrying to have your luggage sitting outside the front door to a hotel on the other side of town for an hour, but they soon sorted it out and brought the bags round so we could go skiing.
Steward Woodward turned up from the ESF that afternoon to have a coffee, and we had a quick catch up while I waited for my trousers to arrive. Not sure quite what he made of us, but he seemed unfazed  A couple of the group needed lessons and got these booked, they seemed happy with the teaching and what they learned, and seem to have caught the bug, which is good. Another member of the group had booked a private session one morning, which seemed to help his skiing along too.
Roll on day one. We’d warmed up on the free lifts the day before, so now we were ready to do some proper skiing. We went around the various runs from the top of the Paquis lift, the closest to the chalet, and generally poked around Lavachet. The sun was shining, but it was cold. Everyone in the group seemed to have worked out how to stay warm, with lots of layers and double thick underpants etc. Now on to the most important bit of the day – lunch. Some of you will know that frankly the skiing part of the holiday is very much secondary to the eating part of the holiday. But I have to do something to burn off the calories from 3 course dinners and big mountain lunches. So I go skiing.
We hit the Marmot Arms. http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g196714-d3531512-Reviews-The_Marmot_Arms-Tignes_Savoie_Rhone_Alpes.html
An unassuming place with ski videos and rap music to keep the youth of today entertained while presumably they work out why their jackets and trousers don’t fit them, I guess a lot like me they must have bought them in the sales and assumed that XXL would be ok, and in fact it turned out to be a bit bigger than expected. An easy mistake to make. Don’t worry kids, it will keep happening for as long as you the last size of any ski gear on the internet. But if you can afford to drink in a pub charging 5 euros for a pint I suspect you can afford some new ski gear.
Burgers in the Marmot Arms are unassuming things. They don’t look like a lot of food. They are served in a simple basket with a few chips. A small meal, thinks Monium, for the East Midlands Amateur Eating Champion 1997. But no, somehow like a tardis you discover that the baskets are so deep that you must have gone right through the table to pick up the burger before you. It takes two hands just to control the thing, using the patented pinky and thumb under and three controllers on top technique. The bun is good. Their chicken burger especially hits the spot, with brie and cranberry on top of a whole lot of escalope, in a burger. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm. But so much food. An unmanageable amount of food. Many tried, and many failed, and suddenly you understand why 13 euros isn’t a bad price for a burger and chips. Blimey. A good start to the lunches for the week.
The afternoon was spent skiing in a very relaxed fashion, including a bit of a sit down on the lifts to recover from lunch. We did a few more blue and red runs, and ended the day some time around 4pm, only to discover cake and quiche waiting for us in the chalet. Oh well, a bit more food for me. Sadly at this point various of our more dependent members of the group discovered a lack of a coffee machine. “INSTANT? INSTANT?!” they shouted, until I fell asleep a bit in a chair. They were not happy campers. This was reported to the staff, who seemed to believe nothing could be done.
Day one ended with me having to get out of bed for dinner, a nice way to do things, and involved three courses of food designed for maximum calories to keep us all going. I think they assumed we wouldn’t be having lunch on the mountain, based on portion sizes. Quite a lot to eat, but we did our best.
Unfortunately the meals are served with free wine. I say unfortunately, because you really do get what you pay for. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to move from the 30c wine bucket to the 1 euro wine bucket in a chalet costing several hundred pounds, after all each person is drinking less than a bottle a day, and a bit of money spent here would be a dramatic improvement. In the end many of the group resorted to buying beers from the local supermarket to drink with dinner.
Day two, and we had made a decision to head to Val D’Isere. Not quite sure how the decision got made, but we tend to just follow anybody who looks like they know what they are doing and points their skis in the right direction. We headed down to La Daille, amongst other places, and had a good old ski about. Conditions were icier in Val than in Tignes, presumably because of the lower altitude and more melting had happened in the days before. Still a fair bit of snow, and nothing really boilerplate around, just the odd patch of quite firm piste that wouldn’t hold much of an edge.
We pootled into a place for lunch, I think that was the day we went to Bananas. The food was ok, but no seating inside as a result of some health and safety thing (not very reassuring, but it seems perhaps something to do with a fire last year) and it was pretty cold out and snowing. Prices were pretty high for what we got, and a pretty limited menu compared with other places. I can’t see us going back, but it put fuel in the tank for the afternoon.
The weather closed in a bit, so we headed ooop the Olympique lift and back into Tignes for an afternoon ski.
Next day I was in charge of lunch, so after a morning including a run down the Aguille Percee where Mrs M managed to lose a ski on the very top of the run, before even setting off, and somehow blamed me for this, we headed to a quality family-run restaurant just up from the Marmot Arms, no idea what the name of it but we’ve been there before, it is the first one as you walk up the hill that has steps up to the entrance. Good pizza, good French food, good pasta. It was snowing again, so we took our time on this one. An afternoon up the Palafour and round that side of Le Lac polished off a nice day on the mountain.
This routine continued, with more skiing, including a few bonkers runs down what I think was the Paquerettes, which was bumpy, with icy moguls down the middle and generally a bit unpleasant in very limited visibility. We went back a couple of days later in better visibility and it wasn’t much easier!
We also went down to Le Fornet to go for Tartiflette in L’Arolay. Not a bad place for lunch, but pricey. The tartiflette is good, but I can’t say I’m completely sold on the place, what made it a whole lot better was walking down from the run into Le Fornet and then getting on the bus outside the restaurant to get to the Olympique cablecar instead of trudging back up the hill after lunch.
http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g187271-d1322606-Reviews-Restaurant_L_Arolay-Val_d_Isere_Savoie_Rhone_Alpes.html
We did some more skiing, some more snoozing in the afternoons, and at some point half way through the week we got a new coffee machine in the chalet. Much happiness ensued, I even had a cup to celebrate, and I’m not a big coffee drinker. I suppose in the scheme of things if a broken coffee machine is the worst you’ve got to complain about then you are onto a good thing. But it was a bit annoying.
The lunch schedule continued almost without a stop until once again I was duped. I got out of bed late, some time around 11:30, and caught up with the others, who had been inducing members of the group to the boardercross park in Val D’Isere (good fun) and ended up stopping for an express lunch at the bottom. I wasn’t allowed to vote on lunch locations, because they were already eating as I got off the top of the Paquis, and had to race down to the lift, through the boardercross, and then onto the terrace just to make sure they didn’t run off before I’d eaten. Quick run through, an overcooked slice of pizza, a few chips and a coke for 10 euros and I was back in the game. They had much nicer pasta dishes, so go for these instead if you’ve got more than 5 minutes to eat.
More skiing, including more attempts at silly itineraire runs followed, with a fair amount of laughing and some entertaining falls along the way. We were now comfortably pretty much skiing whatever came up in front of us, without much thought about where it would put us. A nice way to ski – no piste maps, just go out and have some fun, and see where you end up. Ski what is in front of you, and when it gets to 3 o’clock start thinking about getting the links back to home resort.
To go on more about the skiing, before I left I spent the day with Inside Out at Hemel to try and sort out my backseat habit. This time was very well spent, and during the week I was able to ski pretty much all day, finding that cold toes brought me in much earlier than my aching thighs did, and ended up having to make some DIY boot gloves out of neoprene from the spares kit, and also was able to give a mate some pointers on getting out of the back seat too as he was having the same kind of problems I’d had the year before and calling it a day early as a result. For anyone that hasn’t been there and tried to ski all day in the back seat, I can confirm the pain is similar to someone basically stabbing you in the thighs every time you put in a turn, and it feels like the rest of the world is somehow immune to this. I did manage on a day of flatter light to catch myself falling into the old habit, and quickly ran a couple of the drills from the training day – lifting the tail of the ski on each turn particularly as we headed down a blue run was a useful tool and instantly relieved the lactic buildup. I would strongly recommend anyone planning a trip after a few months off get in touch with the guys to do a similar day – it just sets you up so much better for the whole trip, not just the first day, and it allowed me to be at the front of the group enjoying myself instead of chasing the group down the mountain stopping every 200 yards.
More skiing, more lunch, more dinner, and soon we were on our way back. A fairly sociable 6:30am start got us back to Grenoble, once again on a bus perfectly large enough for normal human beings and their bags, and everyone caught up on some more sleep before landing in Gatwick fairly tired, but good tired, from a week of fun skiing with old friends and a few newer ones too.
Back to Blighty and now on with planning the next one – if only the planning was as easy as the trip itself!
A few photos and videos will follow, to give you an idea of the conditions, and to see some textbook skiing. Perhaps.
Links here:
http://www.skiolympic.co.uk/ - did a good job of it generally, and despite a chalet that could do with a bit of updating over the summer they did a good job of things.
http://www.snowheads.com/ski-forum/viewtopic.php?p=2190388 - my day at Mount Hemel learning how to ski proper.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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Monium, Is there an executive summary 
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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skitrack, it occurred to us to just walk to the Sherpa and buy a bottle of decent wine each. In the end we just bought 4 or 5 crates of beer and that worked ok, but I do expect the wine to be at least drinkable. I had to put 50% water into the wine to drink it, and I will pretty much drink anything. Well, other than Genepi. That stuff is rancid.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
You'll need to Register first of course.
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Nice report Monium...interesting stories on the lunch eateries.....going to our first catered chalet trip in March so maybe thinking about cutting out the lunch!!?
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Broken coffee machine? Sounds like you were in Chalet Camille where we were two weeks ago!
We must have got lucky with the wine, it was drinkable.
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Forgot to add - I also focused on getting out of the back seat that week. Made a tremendous difference, with thigh pain only setting in on La Face, when I was just focusing on staying on my skis 
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Excellent review, good to spend time advising on the restaurants and food, enjoyed it.
I found Tignes very hit and miss with food so would have liked your review to hand then.
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| NeilMeredith wrote: |
Broken coffee machine? Sounds like you were in Chalet Camille where we were two weeks ago!
We must have got lucky with the wine, it was drinkable. |
We were indeed. I should have mentioned that. Can't believe it has taken 2 weeks for them to sort a coffee machine. I suspect our fairly loud complaints from the coffee lovers hurried things up a bit - on day 2 of Cofeegate we did contemplate going to the local shop, buying one, and taking the money out of the staff tip, but that didn't seem fair. Amazon would have one pretty much anywhere in France next day.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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| Simon94 wrote: |
| Nice report Monium...interesting stories on the lunch eateries.....going to our first catered chalet trip in March so maybe thinking about cutting out the lunch!!? |
You take that back right now. Missing lunch is only acceptable in the event of a medical emergency, and that medical emergency would have to involve me, otherwise I'd be taking a break from first aid to eat lunch. It is a scientific fact - if you don't eat, eventually you will die. So it is important to eat, you never know where your next meal is coming from.
But yes, it is technically possible if you were one of those health-freaks or watching the calories, on paper you really don't need lunch on top of quiche, cake, a decent sized breakfast and 3 course dinners.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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Monium, absolutley agree that a good lunch is very important. I have never seen the attraction in a slice of pizza or panini on the chairlifts. Maybe I should do my own on our lunches in Serre Che sometime.
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Hi Monium, how's the knee  , spatchcock falls and black moguls, you older people should take it easy.........................sending the deposit for italy.
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You know it makes sense.
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I had great meals in Marmottes above the Folie Douce. Mind you, you have just reminded me why I give big, lush resorts a miss ; I had a massive tasty burger, chips and salad in Termingnon at lunch today for 9 euros, so enough dosh left over for an equally massive choc liegeoise...... at L`Escalier
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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Regarding the wine, I'm not too surprised about the quality of the wine. Various TOs do their shopping at my local SuperU and the shelves look like a bunch of locusts have been through ... surprise, surprise the 1 - 2 euro wine on the bottom shelf has vanished! This is along with the "Bien Vu" products.
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Poster: A snowHead
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FAQ
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