With the summer hols drawing to a close and many peoples’ thoughts turning to their next holiday in the snow, we thought we’d produce a short guide to all those things worth considering when you’re booking your (independent) ski holiday.
1. Who is in your group?
This is your starting point. The size, make up (family/friends/couples/lads/girls) and skiing/snowboarding ability of your party will determine to some extent where you go, how you will travel and the type of accommodation you will need.
2. Deciding where to go
Ski resorts vary enormously from the picturesque postcard resort of gingerbread house style chalets (Meribel) to their concrete constructed ugly sisters (Flaine); some are famed for live music and après-ski (Val d’Isere), others for on-piste (Serre Chevalier) and off-piste (La Grave) skiing; some are more beginner and/or child friendly, some have many snow parks (Morzine) and others pride themselves on having something for everyone including non-skiers. Groomed slopes and ski lifts vary in number from resort to resort from a small handful (St. Foy) to huge numbers in ski areas that link multiple resorts on one lift pass (Three Valleys / Portes de Soleil). Think high resorts (Val Thorens) for guaranteed snow conditions for early and late season breaks and lower resorts for easy road access.
3. How will you get there?
Now you’ve decided where to go there are a variety of options open to you in respect of how you get there. Flight + transfer, train + transfer or self-drive are the main ways of getting your group out to resort. Flight-wise there could be up to 4 airports local to your ski resort so researching the best option from your nearest home airport is best but don’t forget to factor in your transfer cost. Your chalet operator will often provide a transfer (either included in the price or for a small additional fee) so it’s worth checking with them first. Those taking the train can go direct overnight or during the day from London St. Pancras to Moutiers or Bourg-St. Maurice. Another option requires a quick connection dash across Paris (this is often cheaper but perhaps not one best taken with children in your party). Favoured by families is the self-drive option which often provides best value if there are 4 or more in the car. Don’t forget it’s a 10 hr or so drive to many resorts from Calais so take plenty of in-car entertainment!
4. What type of accommodation and catering are you looking for?
Ski resort accommodation includes chalets, apartments and hotels. Independently booked chalets will generally be run by enthusiastic hosts (often by the business owners themselves) and are usually fully catered to include breakfast, afternoon tea and evening meals with drinks although it is possible to find self-catered chalets. Apartments are usually self-catered and often you will be left alone once you have picked up your key. Hotels are much like hotels the world over - usually a perfectly comfortable (if perhaps a more impersonal than a catered chalet) way to spend your ski holiday. Families with young children should remember to ask about facilities and menus for younger family members. Another thing to bear in mind is the make-up of the rooms. Many will be twins and doubles but family suites and triples are also available. Check the location of your accommodation too. If you’re not within easy reach of the slopes or the ski bus, does your accommodation provide transport to and from the lifts? Don’t forget, if you go self-catered you will need to think about food and drink; is your accommodation in easy reach of supermarkets and/or restaurants? Factor in a food budget and don’t forget food bought in supermarket resorts is a lot pricier than in your local Tesco’s!
5. Booking lessons, equipment hire, lift passes, ski lockers etc
For all of these things, we recommend speaking with your chalet operator. They will often be able to order your lift passes, book your ski locker (if you want one) and point you in the direction of the nearest (and/or best value) ski hire company. They will also know who’s hot and who’s not when it comes to ski and snowboard instruction in resort. Tap them up for information and booking advice.
6. Insurance
Our advice is don’t leave home without it! Accidents do unfortunately happen, even if they aren’t your fault and you don’t want to be caught short of insurance if you need to be airlifted or stretchered off the mountain. Check your travel insurance small print and make sure you’re covered. If you do happen to leave home without sorting it out, buy the insurance on offer with your lift pass which covers you for all your activities on the mountain.
7. Having fun
This is the easy bit. If you’ve taken everything above into account then you’ve done the hard work. Sit back and relax with a vin chaud and a big slice of cake after a hard day on the slopes!
Friday, 27 August 2010
Friday, 13 August 2010
Mountains of food!
As many of you know it’s been a busy summer for Alpine Ethos with numerous social functions; weddings, birthdays, camping trips and so on which has given rise to lots of opportunities to talk about what we do for a living. It seems that people are (perhaps not surprisingly) quite interested in our chalet venture compared to our previous lives working in the financial sector and often ask us about it at length. Invariably the subject turns to food; what we serve in the chalet and what the local specialities are in and around Meribel and so the inspiration for today’s blog.
Mountain regions the world over are known for their cheese production, and the Savoie is no exception. Local cheeses including beaufort and comte are used in abundance to create that ski resort favourite, the fondue. Traditionally a heated pot of cheese melted together with white wine is placed in the centre of the table and served with bread cubes for dipping and cold, cured meats and salad as accompaniments. Another traditional cheese focused dish is raclette, where a large wedge of (raclette) cheese is presented on a tray-with-heat-element contraption for you to melt the cheese and scrape it onto your plate of potatoes, gherkins, cured meat and salad – yum!
As if this wasn’t enough of a cheese-fest, another local speciality is the humble tartiflette; an oven baked dish of creamy, carbohydrate-loaded loveliness using potatoes, lardons (bacon bits), cream and reblochon cheese.
For those meat lovers, the ‘pierre chaud’ may be your dish of choice, literally a ‘hot stone’ which is brought to your table with a platter of raw meat for you to sizzle to your liking. A variation of the fondue is also found where the cheesy sauce is replaced with hot oil for you to cook strips of meat at your table.
Many of you will already have heard of the dishes described above, so onto a couple of other local plates we’ve come across. Diots de Savoie is the name of the local sausage, possibly the meatiest pork sausage you’ll ever come across which is often found on menus braised in white wine and served with crozets. Crozets are little squares of buckwheat pasta (specific to the Savoie) which are boiled then put into a dish with cream and cheese and baked before serving. It’s not unusual to order a steak in Meribel and find it served with French fries, crozets and bread for that sleep-inducing triple carb hit! We suppose the active lifestyle of the mountains justifies this Atkins-unfriendly feasting.
All this talk of food is making us hungry, time to stock up on some good old UK favourites before we head back to France....Yorkshire pudding anyone?
Mountain regions the world over are known for their cheese production, and the Savoie is no exception. Local cheeses including beaufort and comte are used in abundance to create that ski resort favourite, the fondue. Traditionally a heated pot of cheese melted together with white wine is placed in the centre of the table and served with bread cubes for dipping and cold, cured meats and salad as accompaniments. Another traditional cheese focused dish is raclette, where a large wedge of (raclette) cheese is presented on a tray-with-heat-element contraption for you to melt the cheese and scrape it onto your plate of potatoes, gherkins, cured meat and salad – yum!
As if this wasn’t enough of a cheese-fest, another local speciality is the humble tartiflette; an oven baked dish of creamy, carbohydrate-loaded loveliness using potatoes, lardons (bacon bits), cream and reblochon cheese.
For those meat lovers, the ‘pierre chaud’ may be your dish of choice, literally a ‘hot stone’ which is brought to your table with a platter of raw meat for you to sizzle to your liking. A variation of the fondue is also found where the cheesy sauce is replaced with hot oil for you to cook strips of meat at your table.
Many of you will already have heard of the dishes described above, so onto a couple of other local plates we’ve come across. Diots de Savoie is the name of the local sausage, possibly the meatiest pork sausage you’ll ever come across which is often found on menus braised in white wine and served with crozets. Crozets are little squares of buckwheat pasta (specific to the Savoie) which are boiled then put into a dish with cream and cheese and baked before serving. It’s not unusual to order a steak in Meribel and find it served with French fries, crozets and bread for that sleep-inducing triple carb hit! We suppose the active lifestyle of the mountains justifies this Atkins-unfriendly feasting.
All this talk of food is making us hungry, time to stock up on some good old UK favourites before we head back to France....Yorkshire pudding anyone?
Friday, 6 August 2010
Ski helmets: to wear or not to wear?
Regular blog readers may have noticed a lack of news from our quarters of late and the truth is it’s been a busy few weeks at Alpine Ethos HQ. Three friends’ weddings, one 30th birthday (Andy), a camping trip and a house sale (well, subject to contract) has meant little time to download our thoughts. We have however, just about sold all of the peak weeks of the season. We will be welcoming some new and some returning guests and the enquiries are starting to gain real momentum with early January looking like the next few weeks to sell.
Apart from all of the above, our attention has been recently caught by an upsurge in interest in the subject of helmet wearing for skiing and snowboarding. An MSc student at the University of Surrey is currently undertaking a survey of attitudes towards helmet wearing, causing many of the various ski and snowboard interest groups and websites to wade in on the debate so we thought we’d put our two penn’rth in too!
According to the student conducting the survey, helmets “may reduce the risk of serious head injuries by as much as 50%”. In some resorts, notably in Italy and Austria, there are laws mandating the wearing of helmets for children aged under 14. But after the death of Natasha Richardson in the 2008-9 season, wouldn’t it make sense for everyone to wear them?
Andy and I have been wearing helmets since 2006 following a scary moment when I crashed on my own on an icy patch of snow and used my head to break the fall. It hurt and I briefly lost consciousness. I needed no more convincing that a helmet was a necessary piece of kit and promptly walked straight into the nearest shop to make my purchase. Now, I’m not saying it was the most stylish piece of kit (it really wasn’t) but it did the job and finally, this season I got around to replacing it for something a bit more lightweight and acceptable amongst my peers. Many of the seasonnaires we know wear helmets and will claim good reason for doing so. It seems to us, that this inexpensive piece of kit doesn’t restrict your ability to ski or snowboard, keeps your head warm in place of the beanie you might have been wearing and just might help save you from ruining your holiday or season through serious injury.
Whilst we are clearly advocates of the wearing of ski & snowboard helmets we do understand it is a personal choice, it’s just that personally we don’t ride our bikes without bike helmets, nor drive our car without wearing seatbelts. Anyway, boarding without a helmet actually feels pretty weird these days causing us to be doubly careful which is not much fun with a board strapped to your feet and a snowy mountain or two at your disposal. We’ll be wearing our helmets next season, the question is will you?
Apart from all of the above, our attention has been recently caught by an upsurge in interest in the subject of helmet wearing for skiing and snowboarding. An MSc student at the University of Surrey is currently undertaking a survey of attitudes towards helmet wearing, causing many of the various ski and snowboard interest groups and websites to wade in on the debate so we thought we’d put our two penn’rth in too!
According to the student conducting the survey, helmets “may reduce the risk of serious head injuries by as much as 50%”. In some resorts, notably in Italy and Austria, there are laws mandating the wearing of helmets for children aged under 14. But after the death of Natasha Richardson in the 2008-9 season, wouldn’t it make sense for everyone to wear them?
Andy and I have been wearing helmets since 2006 following a scary moment when I crashed on my own on an icy patch of snow and used my head to break the fall. It hurt and I briefly lost consciousness. I needed no more convincing that a helmet was a necessary piece of kit and promptly walked straight into the nearest shop to make my purchase. Now, I’m not saying it was the most stylish piece of kit (it really wasn’t) but it did the job and finally, this season I got around to replacing it for something a bit more lightweight and acceptable amongst my peers. Many of the seasonnaires we know wear helmets and will claim good reason for doing so. It seems to us, that this inexpensive piece of kit doesn’t restrict your ability to ski or snowboard, keeps your head warm in place of the beanie you might have been wearing and just might help save you from ruining your holiday or season through serious injury.
Whilst we are clearly advocates of the wearing of ski & snowboard helmets we do understand it is a personal choice, it’s just that personally we don’t ride our bikes without bike helmets, nor drive our car without wearing seatbelts. Anyway, boarding without a helmet actually feels pretty weird these days causing us to be doubly careful which is not much fun with a board strapped to your feet and a snowy mountain or two at your disposal. We’ll be wearing our helmets next season, the question is will you?
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