Ski Vacation in the French ALps
I know, I know! I haven't been keeping the blog up to date regularly. I have a good excuse though...we were getting ready for our ski trip to the French Alps and have just returned. It was magnificient! We stayed in St Gervais, France at a chalet run by a very warm and friendly Irish family. The weather was incredible and the views were breath taking. We vacationed with six other families, 14 adults and 20 children in total. See the photo of the whole crew below.
It was a very well organized trip thanks to Debbie, one of the gang. The chalet included breakfast and dinner, the children were enrolled in ski school and/or babysitting, we picked up our lift tickets at the chalet when we arrived and the rental shop had all the details of our needs. Things couldn't have been going more smoothly until day 2 when we arrived 20 minutes early to watch the last few minutes of the girls' ski lesson...
It was awful! Megan and Alyssa were both crying hysterically and I witnessed one of the instructors yelling at them. I raced in to find out what was wrong and the instructor told me, "It is impossible for them to return tomorrow." (Spoken with a heavy french accent.) I asked her what had happened and she said they wouldn't stop crying for the past 45 minutes to an hour. Well if you keep yelling at them of course they are not going to stop crying. I got the girls out of there as quickly as I could noticing there were quite a few other children crying too. I don't really know what happened but after I got Alyssa and Megan calmed down they told me they did not want to go back to the yelling school and didn't want to ski again. Ok, I agreed they would not go back to the yelling school but it is unacceptable for this family for them to not want to ski! I was furious at the instructor for being such a jerk! We got our money back for the rest of the week and Rick and I took the girls out on the slopes ourselves which they loved. In the end every one of the five children we were with that was enrolled in the French ski school stopped going. Some made it more days than others but everyone agreed that it was not a good situation.
Drew's lessons on the other hand went off with out a hitch. The instructors were great, the kids learned a ton and had a great time. This ski school only taught kids as young as six otherwise we would have put the girls there too. Yes, we lied about Drew's age. You should see Drew skiing now! He does really, really well. We had him and all the others out on intermediate slopes and they were all zipping around and even looking for little jumps. It was amazing how quickly the kids improved.
Rick and I were able to ski every afternoon kid free thanks to ski lessons and babysitting. It was really fun. The ski area was so big we didn't even get a chance to ski the whole thing. The conditions were great in the beginning of the week but deteriorated a bit as the week progressed because the weather was so incredible. So we really couldn't complain. The very last day of skiing it snowed like crazy.
In the evenings the chalet had an early dinner for the kids and fed the adults a bit later. It gave us all time to get the kids in bed before we ate. After dinner we hung out in the common area and talked and played games. It was a really great trip although I feel like I need a vacation to recover from my vacation.
So now we are off planning the next adventure...
posted by Lyn and Rick at
12:26 PM
|
0 comments
