Potatoes planted

Planted the potatoes and weeded somewhat for planting tomatoes and sweetcorn in due course.

We only created these beds last year and I ended up rearranging them somewhat to make them easier to mow around. The area around the bed is mainly nettles, but hopefully frequent mowing will help it turn in to grass.

Samoëns for a bit of extra skiing

 Visiting the apartment in Samoëns after our local ski area closed.

The Alps are BIG. The Grand Massif is a lot bigger than our local ski area (The Grand Tourmalet)

We left our place in the snow which was unexpected for the time of year and a bit stressful! The poor animals weren’t expecting it and we are still hoping for one more lamb.

Some snow on the way, but roads good. We arrived at the apartment all covered in snow too. Lovely!

Mont Blanc in the background

Samoëns village

Lots of lovely snow!

You can see Mont Blanc a lot. It is so big!

Super groovy lift in Flaine. 50s? 60s?

We ate a lot

Drank qsome

Low down didn’t stay snowy for long and we had a bit of rain. But up higher still plenty of snow.

View from the apartment car park 

Cool dudes

You can see that pointy mountain from just about everywhere in Samoëns.

Our apartment is in the left hand building looking in to the garden in the middle of the development

On the funky Flaine lift. You have to run after it to leap on and step off backwards.

The cheese sellers in Samoëns market all gave Poppy lots of cheese rind (and some real cheese!), making her 10th birthday her best day ever!

Walk to a waterfall on a wet day when the ski area was closed (due to wind)

Stocked up on the local (Savoie) white wine. Yum!

Pizza from the very convenient little pizza kiosk a minute from the apartment

We need to do a bit of work to freshen up the apartment as nothing much has been done to it since it was built in 2005

We are planning on adding a terrace to make the outside a bit nicer as well as updating the kitchen and bathroom. But not until next year.

Here’s Doug modeling the Samoëns t-shirt I made for him. Should have done one for Poppy too!

New raspberries planted

I managed to kill the Willamette raspberries trying to encourage them to grow in a different direction to the one they wanted and possibly by pruning them at the wrong time.

I decided to plant the new ones in a narrower row in the hope that it will make netting them easier, we shall see…

Planted a row of Willamette plus a row each of these. I always get confused about how I am meant to prune the different types. Hopefully can manage to work it out and not murder these ones!

Skiing on sand

The ski area has gone a rather unattractive brown colour due to lots of Sahara sand being blown up this way and they getting washed out of the air as it snowed then rained.

Perhaps it is nice and exfoliating for the skis!

Little bit of new snow

It has been a strange year for the snow. There were a couple of very early storms that closed the road to the ski area for days on end. That was before Christmas, since then we have had a little snow hear and there, but otherwise very dry. 

This has meant a lot of lovely piste cruising, but not much powder and terrible conditions of piste. Nice to have a tiny bit of fresh, enough to make the off piste quite pleasant at least…

You know you are old when…

… the delivery of a new washer and dryer is one of the most exciting things to happen in weeks, MONTHS, YEARS!!

Here the delivery guy is teaching us how to kneel and worship it properly. 

Never gets boring

 We’ve been skiing at weekends with the ‘crowds’ more than some years because of my work.

Compared to the Alps though it isn’t so busy, we have just been spoilt over the years expecting solitude.