The White Stuff

One of the first things we decided for A's visit to us was that we had to take her to the mountains.  On a Skype call before she came she said that she had never touched snow.  And so, this morning, we all got up way earlier than we wanted, piled on thermals and ski gear, stuffed the car with hats, scarves and gloves and headed down the road to Ax les Thermes, which we figured was our closest sure snow.

The village is quite pretty (and low enough to be snow-free), and there's a long cable car ride up to the ski station, where happily there was plenty of snow. We hired a couple of sledges and the kids had a go on them, then we built snowmen, hurled snowballs and made snow angels - lots of firsts ticked off for A!  Back down the mountain for lunch, we were caught out by the usual French problem: 2pm and all the food places are shut.  Well, that's just more cultural education for A!  I suppose we could have driven a handful of miles into Spain to find that restaurants were just opening for lunch...  Eventually, sandwiches were foraged.

To squeeze more into the day, we'd arranged to go to the Grotte de Niaux to see the cave paintings.  Mr B figured this one sounded cool as it is not lit... I have to say that, as a claustrophobe, this was not ringing my bells, but he was determined that it would be great so we gave it a go.  It was, turns out, great.  The cave was large - only a few small bits where you had to squeeze though - and we all had our own torches.  Providing I didn't remember too often how deep we were, I was fine...  The paintings were not at all what I was expecting. being overlaid on top of one another, but perhaps that's inevitable given the length of time the cave was in use.  Also interesting was the graffiti along the way - with names and dates of visitors, the earliest from the 1600s. A few bumped heads for members of our party, and I think A managed to stand in every puddle and at one point had the whole group (about 16) shouting at her to keep out of the lake...  (It was hard to see the difference between puddle and not puddle.)

Then the long long journey home for snacks and bed.