Another great day....

...for mountain restaurants.

At 11am it was minus 15 at the Marmottes Express chairlift, which is one of Val's sunspots, and there are reports of minus 25 elsewhere at 2000m, so you can imagine how cold it was in the shadows and with wind chill. Or maybe you can't, especially if you live in a hot climate and have never been away from it.

So for the brave fools who ventured out of their toasty abodes, with as little flesh bared as possible, it was a case of hitting the slopes for as long as one could bear it, and then heading to the nearest mountain restaurant. Needless to say they were doing very, very good business today. I was all out of supplies so headed off without my usual emergency snack in-pocket. Bad move. I soon had cravings for a chocolate something and paid two hundred and fifty euro cents for a snickers bar.

Despite the lack of new snow the Val piste bashers are doing an excellent job of preparing the pistes for the following day, and there was actually some decent skiing to be had on the less skied gentler slopes. I imagine Tignes is just an ice rink set at various angles to the horizontal, but I'm not in a hurry to find out.

In the afternoon I hit the long and windy road that leads to the supermarket in Bourg St Maurice, and spent a pleasant couple of hours marveling at how expensive the Val supermarkets are. I bought some food too. Felicity, if you're reading this, the Skoda is doing a great job and hasn't conked out on me yet (knocking noodle), although the wind screen cleaning fluid had frozen (it's guaranteed to minus 15).

Tomorrow I'm heading off piste again for the first time in ten days, up to the Col des Fours, which in one of my favorites. The instruction was to 'dress warm'.