... and the winner is...

Les Brevieres!

Yes, we have finally settled on a place to live and signed lease papers today! We are very excited. The village is called Tignes Les Brevieres. It is lift-connected to the Tignes and Val d'Isere ski areas (aka "Espace Killy") with 90 lifts and 6250 ft of vertical. We think it is the perfect compromise, with gondola access to great skiing, but away from the scene of Val d'Isere, and much, much cheaper. It has the feel of a real town, as opposed to a complete resort, and the influence of the rich Brits is a little less prominent. Our landlords, the Favres, live across the street. Monsieur is a retired ski instructor. The pictures here show the village from both ends of its main street.

The apartment is a 23 square meter (250 square feet) studio "cabine", which means there is a tiny room for sleeping. Everything is extremely small by American standards, as you can imagine, but it is 2.5 times the size of our RV, so it will feel pretty big to us. We don't plan to stay there until next fall, which was confusing to the Favres, since we are renting it for the year, but to satisfy the requirement for the oh-so-fun French paperwork known as the Carte de Sejour, we needed an address now... So right after signing the lease paperwork (well, actually two hours later, since it was lunchtime), we headed up to the Mairie (town hall) at Tignes le Lac and filed our Carte de Sejour applications. I'm pretty sure the woman who helped us had never seen our particular case. She admitted she normally does the paperwork for the work visas for seasonal workers (in fact, she tried to tell us we didn't need a Carte de Sejour!).

Now that it is over, I'm feeling like the process of finding a place wasn't all that difficult. We stumbled through a lot of phone calls (remember GEGOR!?) and burned through quite a bit of gas driving between the two valleys, but were fairly lucky because we saw many things that would work for us. The most difficult part was deciding (for which we re-instituted "The Matrix"*) and waiting. We waited around all day one day to see an apartment (the owners still have not returned our call... and we had a tentative appointment!), and another day to find out if M. Ernault's tenant in Val d'Isere was going to renew next year. He did. Which left us a bit disappointed, but ended up saving us a lot of money. Neither of us are particularly patient with these things. The up-side is that the process got us talking to lots of real French people.


-SK

a Bourg St. Maurice

*"The Matrix" is a weighted scorecard we developed when we were house-hunting which made us a bit notorious with our real-estate agents. Warner Brothers did not pay us for the name when they stole it.

Le fin de la Saison

The ski season has finally come to a close in the Alps, with most areas closing last Sunday and only the few glacially high mega resorts such as Espace Killy (Val D'Isere and Tigne), Trois Valles, and Zermatt remaining open and even those only through the 8th of May. I only managed 14 days on the slopes due to the logistical difficulties of setting up our life in France. Having our skis arrive February 23rd in Paris didn't help much either. It was a rather successful season with regards to my must ski list, where I was able to check off five of my top eight areas and we may yet ski Zermatt which would make it 6 of 8.

The highlights: knee deep fresh powder tracks off the top of the Grand Montet in Chamonix (even with a wait of 1-hr 15min, the longest in my skiing career), knee deep powder off piste from the top of the Trois Vallees, and touring up the Argentiere Glacier in Chamonix. The best ski area? That depends on what you want. If you want the most on piste terrain, which means you don't need to ski with a beacon, shovel and probe, Trois Valles is without a doubt the best. Great snow, great variety, insanely big. Chamonix can't be beat for the scenery, imagine the Grand Canyon but with an alpine setting, and the Grand Montet at Chamonix has a solid 3000 feet of steep vertical that you ski for every run. If you crave off piste skiing and touring the Espace Killy can't be beat and the lift system is so good that even during the French school holidays in February there are NO LINES! That same lift system lets you rip up serious amounts of vertical if you choose to ski the groomed runs as I did on my last day there, racking up over 25,000 vertical even-though I was off the mountain by 3pm.

Alas the lifts close and the snow melts and it must come to an end. The picture here shows Steph coming down from our tour at Pralagnon la Vanoise, a spectacular town set deep in the Vanoise Mountains of Savoie. We skinned up under the ski lifts which had closed the day before and on into the backcountry up to the the Col de Vanoise set at the foot of the highest peak in Savoie. We were down by 2pm, skiing out the piste that had been groomed the night before for the last time, then basked in the sun of the warm spring afternoon.

You can be here for the next go round. Come join us in the Alps. It starts up again in late November and will finish again in the warm sun of late April. You know how to reach us....

CM

a Savoie, France

Meeting Gegor

We've looked at a lot of apartments this week, and I think tomorrow we'll be able to make a decision about where to live! When we do, we'll be sure to post pictures so you can see what you're in for when you come to visit us next year...

... And believe it or not, we were able to connect with Gegor (see last post). This is the man we have a LOT of trouble understanding on the phone. Everything went according to (our) plan. We called him from the town hall (in a very small town) and said (in French) "We are standing in front of the Mairie. Can you meet us here and we can go to the apartment together?" Apparently, that worked, because a few minutes later a man came wandering down the hill and kind of looked at us from behind some cars. We approached, and and introduced ourselves, then followed Gegor up to the apartment, which was in a excellent location next to a ski run in St. Martin de Belleville. As soon as he opened the front door to the building though, I sensed a bit of an odor that prepared me for what we were about to see...

The best way to describe Gegor's place is "solid squalor". Solid, because at least the building appeared to be very tough, built out of stone with no cardboard or plastic windows. But otherwise uninhabitable, as far as Craig and I were concerned. Stacks of laundry and trash on the floor... On the kitchen table, a loaf of crusty bread, and the moldiest hunk of cheese I've ever seen (and remember, this is France, so that's saying something!) In the bedroom, where the walls were covered with some sort of carpeting, two bunks covered with dirty landry and an armoire with some piles of dirt (or bugs) in the shadows, on the windowsill, a dirty ashtray and (I presume) Gegor's false teeth. (No wonder we can't understand him!) We were afraid to ask to see the bathroom, but were curious if there even was one... There was, it had half a toilet seat (Gegor mentioned making some repairs).

When we left, Gegor asked us to please give him three days notice to clean the place. We're pretty sure it will take three months.

On the bright side, we've seen several other apartments that work well for us. Nothing bigger than about 30 square meters (approx 320 square feet) though, so be prepared! And in Val d'Isere, most (affordable) places are more like 18 square meters. It's almost like going back to a dorm room.

-SK
a Val d'Isere

Renting an appartment... and looking for tenants

We are excited because next week we will be looking at several places to live for next winter. It's a hard choice on paper, between Val d'Isere (bigger town, great services, but $$$) and the Trois Vallees area (limited services, less expensive, more authentic). I'm hoping that one of the places we look at will just "click" and the decision will be easy. We have been getting better at our French telephone skills, though it is still a bit scary to call people. (I'm in the habit of writing a script ahead of time, which actually gets me in trouble because the person on the other end then often overestimates my language skills!) And certain people have a tendancy to scream into the phone with absolutely no enunciation. Which would be kind of humerous if we weren't trying to get some information from them! The conversation goes something like this:

Man on phone: C'est Gegor de (unintelligible) Belleville! (Unintelligible) studio a louer (unintelligible) annee (unintelligible) Belleville!

Craig: Bien, nous voudrions le voir, est-ce que lundi marche pour vous?

Man on phone: C'est GEGOR! G-E-G-O-R!

...and so on.


...And on the home front, we are looking for new tenants for our apartment. The photo of our view is above. Here is the "ad":

Queen Anne View condo for rent $1650/month.

Your chance to live with the "Fraiser" view! 1000 square feet, 2 bedroom, 1 bath, gas fireplace, balcony, washer/dryer, dishwasher. Easy access to downtown Seattle, UW, SPU. Walking distance to restaurants, theater/ballet/opera, major sporting events, and all services. One secure parking spot and storage unit. Your rent includes basic cable TV, gas, water/sewer/garbage and hot water. No smoking. Cats OK. 1 year lease.

Let us know if you know anyone interested.

Finally, right now we're back in Chamonix (free Wi-Fi at l'Office du Tourisme), and will see our friend Marge Wheeler, who is here on her way to guiding an Haute Route trip!

-SK
a Chamonix

Mastercard scam!

Best rate? Bullshit!

Right now we are extremely frustrated with Mastercard. Here's why:

We bought our RV with our Mastercard, assuming, like they always say, that we would get the best current exchange rate. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. They have charged us 3.78% over the exchange rate on the day of the charge. As you can imagine, with a large amount, this is a significant sum of money! Other charges that we made with our Mastercard have been typically 1% over the current exchange rate, which seems like a reasonable fee. But almost 4% -- I think not!

So, beware when using your Mastercard on large purchases overseas!

-SK
a Les Menuiers

Wet, wet, wet

Well, we've been at Chamonix for nearly a week, and only managed to ski 2 days due to seriously wet weather. (Yes, I admit it, I'm becoming a bit of a fair-weather skier. But come on, we have all year, and I'm still recovering from knee surgery! And as you northwesterners know, skiing in the rain really sucks.)

However, when the weather is good here, it's spectacular! (as you can see in the photo where I'm getting ready to ski down les Grand Montets.) Of course, everyone comes out of the woodwork when there is a break in the rain, creating the worst liftlines we've ever seen. We waited nearly 45 minutes to load the base access chair from Argentiere -- an adventure in itself which involved putting our skis on indoors, then waddling across carpet (in a crowd, of course!) to get on the chairlift. Then we waited an hour and fifteen minutes for the Grand Montets tram when it finally opened...

We're heading back to Savoie now, hopefully it will be drier in les Trois Vallees.

Happy birthday Berdie!