January in Rebbers

This is Reberty.

And that is the piste. 100m from my front door.

We’re the highest village on the mountain and have to ski/board down to get to a chairlift to take us further up. Please appreciate this shot – I nearly dropped my phone from the chair lift trying to get it! =]

And here's a shot of the village from the other side of the valley. Reberty is the top little triangle of buildings.

This is Chalet Eva, our biggest chalet. I used to live just behind the car underneath the balcony but Murren and I moved this week into the staff accom further down the road. A lot of nannies are leaving and we’ve got new staff coming in so to deal with the whole male/female sharing ratio thing we’ve all shuffled around. It’s nice to not have to walk down the street to use the kettle, though we still have to go down the stairs which are outside.

Times have been busy here in the Alps. The snow has been endless. Last week we had about 2m of snow in 3 days, on top of the meter or so that was already there. We’ve had the most snow in 21 years and the people who’ve been here for many seasons can’t believe it. I’ve been shovelling my little heart out and I’m pleased to say the muscles are coming along nicely!

The biggest challenge has been the Eva playroom balcony. Because I’ve been so busy recently and hadn’t got round to clearing it, the snow piled up around 1m deep, and the bottom couple of feet had frozen to pure ice. I’ve been slugging at it for about 3 days and I’m still nowhere near the bottom.

There’s nowhere to put the snow except on the road so it’s a case of flinging it over the balcony. In the process I built my own mountain! I guess I figured that if I didn't have time to go to the mountain I'd create my own - or whatever that old line is.

Everyone is throwing all their snow out onto the road and the snowplough is failing to clear it all quick enough, which meant the road became pretty impassable. Car after car got stuck in the snow, even when they have snow chains on they just got beached. So many people must have almost burned their engines out as their wheels just span. I’ve had to dig out at least 3 cars this week. One of our families drove to the resort and after it had been stationary for a week it took me maybe 2 hours to dig it out of the snow which had piled half way up the windows!

It’s not just car windows, this is the view from our lounge onto the road outside.

And it’s not just cars and windows that get covered either..!

(That's someone's satellite dish if you can't quite make it out!)

My biggest challenge is clearing a path from the road to the boot rooms where skis are stored. The banks are getting so high I’m now having to carry the snow from the doorway down the path and onto the road, rather than just pile it on top.

 The snowplough is both good and bad at the same time. While he clears the roads so we can all move around he pushes all the snow to the side, and covers up my freshly dug pathways! And then he piles snow up in really inconvenient places which mean I have to dig through icy boulders!

The kids have been helping me clear some of the snow though. I introduce you to Bernie, my first snowman of the season.

Bunny has been helping too, but he’s a bit small to hold a shovel!

Mostly he’s been up to his usual tricks of playing around. He’s tried bum boarding…

And he came out snowboarding with me today…

 But he wasn’t very good at it so he just decided to admire the view.

I haven’t introduced you to my babies yet. These girls are what make all the hard graft worth it. I’m working anywhere from 12 – 18 hour days so there’s no usually chance to head up the mountain, especially when it’s snowing so much. But today the sun came out and for the first time in a couple of weeks I got to really put them through their paces. As my confidence is increasing again I’m absolutely loving picking up a bit of speed, knowing I’ve got the skills to handle it.

The sun setting over La Pointe De Masse was stunningly beautiful.

Another part of my job is chopping wood for all the fires in the chalets. That’s a lot of fun. I’m getting really good at it. I think I’ve really found my niche. 'Niche', gettit? Cause you have to force the axe deeper and deeper into a niche in the log, yeah, gettit? Gettit? =] 

I know, seriously cheesy. 

On that note, cheese anyone?

Reberty 2000

I’ve been at my resort for almost a month now. It’s in a small village called Reberty in Les Menuires, part of the Savoie region. I live in a tiny ‘apartment’ with one of our chefs, Murren, from Gurnsey, and Haley, one of the childcare team. I say apartment but it’s actually just 2 bedrooms joined by a tiny bathroom. Our lounge/kitchen is 100m down the street – which is great for getting a cup of tea in the middle of a blizzard like right now…

We have 3 chalets here, Eva, Katie 1 and Katie 2 which all sleep between 11 and 17 guests. I haven't got any good photos of them but you can click on the names to see them. My job as the Resort Host is to make sure everything is running smoothly. I test and maintain the hot tubs, sort out ski hire, make sure the chalets have everything they need, help out with the kids, do any odd jobs, fill in where I’m needed and shovel A LOT of snow. I start at 7am until around 1pm and then get a few hours free before I’m back to work at 4pm where I host in chalet Katie 2. I work with the chef Joe to set up and serve kids tea and a 3 course meal for the adults with prosecco and canapés. It involves A LOT of washing up. I usually finish around 10pm.

In between snow shovelling and washing up I try and get out on the mountain as much as possible. I’ll snowboard every day unless the conditions are bad like right now or I really need to sleep, or sometimes I just don’t have time to stop.

Altitude

I’m sitting at 2000m above sea level. Coming from Dorset which is at sea level is a big difference. Last week I got hit with altitude sickness. After boarding down the mountain to a small town nearby all of a sudden I just couldn’t stand up any more. I went really dizzy and weak and when I sat down with my friend to get some food I couldn’t eat anything. I went to bed and slept for the next 3 days.

Transfer Day Trauma

I didn’t get up until 5am on Saturday to take the guests back to the airport and pick up the new ones. This week’s transfer, with week 2’s guests leaving and week 3’s arriving was dramatic and stressful and at times pretty horrific…

It usually takes about 3 hours to get to Geneva airport but we left early because of a huge snowstorm on Friday night. The bus had snowchains on the tires and we travelled at about 10kmph down the mountain through heavy snow. I got a call from Josh, my manager, who told me that a guest from another company had put their bag on our bus by mistake and could I get it off and leave it somewhere nearby as they were travelling to a different airport – not possible as we were running late and I already had nervous passengers. We arrived just in time before check in closed.

But no time to breathe. Mad dash over to terminal 2 to meet the new guests and warn them that we’re looking at a double long journey because of the weather conditions and the fact that everybody in the Alps is on the move on a Saturday. 30,000 cars were expected to be on the road. With only 1 café and at least an hour long que of everyone stocking up for a long journey we decide to stop en route for supplies.

We did stop. But not for sandwiches. 

We were gridlocked on the freeway for 2 hours. I’m alone on the coach with 24 people, half of whom are bored and tired children, the other half are bored and tired adults. I got a phonecall from the director of the company to say the road between us and the mountain was closed because of an avalanche and he’d booked us all into a hotel for the night. A hotel an hour in the wrong direction. Cue very frustrated guests. Most of them were great and very understanding but there were some who would not be appeased.

Eventually we managed to get off the freeway – luckily we’d been near an off ramp – and drove to Grenoble to our hotel. Which we couldn’t find. The driver had never been to Grenoble before and inner city one way streets with a coach is never simple. When we finally found it the barrier into the car park was too low for the bus and we had to drive around the block before we could pull in beside it. And thankfully, yes they’d got a booking for Ski Famille! Relief.

Or not.

As I’m helping unpack cases from the coach I get told our booking is not right. The guy at reception says the Ski Famille booking contains 54 names which are not ours and he doesn’t have another list. I have everyone pushing up behind me trying to find out what is going on and no one who might have any idea what has happened is answering their phone.

So not a great situation…

Then Will turns up. He does the same job as me in another of our resorts, Bruyeres, just a bit down the mountain, and he’s got 52 guests plus a bus driver. The booking is his. But he’s able to tell me that my booking is under the company director’s name. How the receptionist didn’t figure out that his booking for 26 people was for the big crowd of people in his lobby is beyond me. And then the rooms we had were only 4 people rooms, not great for families with 3 kids. There was no restaurant there, only a McDonalds in the closed mall down the street, and McDonald’s in France don’t serve anything vegetarian, so it was just fries for tea.

Next morning we left at 6am. The road had been cleared and there was no traffic so we were able to race to the resort. We were too early to find anywhere open for breakfast so stomachs were growling and throats were seriously dry as we finally arrived in resort at 8:30. I was able to take everybody up to Ski Set our hire shop and get them kitted out with skis and snowboards and they got on the slopes for 11am. Success. Nailed it. Phew…

Christmas

Christmas Day was a lot of fun. We all took an hour to head up the mountain together. Bruyere staff joined us too, and we drank Prosecco from the bottle before skiing/boarding down in a group 20 strong. It was a beautiful sunny day and there was fresh powder on the slopes. It was perfect.

So life here is good. Even though the days are long and exhausting. It gets a bit monotonous and it often feels quite futile. I shovel snow and clear paths and balconies and by the time I’ve finished they’re covered again. But it’s all worth it when I get up on the mountain. It’s so stunningly beautiful sitting up above the clouds with the sun shining down on my face.

The snow is really coming in now! We’ve had about 50cm in the last couple of days and it’s only going to get deeper…

Les Gets ('Luh Jey')

I'm in the Alps and it is insane!!! Where to begin?? Let’s go slow day by day. As if you're snowboarding for the first time in years.

I flew out from Gatwick on Thursday 30^th November to Geneva, Switzerland. I travelled with 2 others, Katie who is the Childcare Supervisor and Will the Resort Host for Les Bruyeres resort. I am the Resort Host for Reberty 2000, and all of us will be in an area called Les Meniures in the famous Three Valleys – the largest ski area in the world.

We’re not there yet though.  We’ve been staying in Les Gets, Ski Famille’s first and largest location. For the first night when it was just us and the managers we stayed in Chalet Bacall, but since then we’ve been living in Hotel Chamoise with the rest of the Chalet Host team. I’m sharing a room with my honest soul sister, Clare, from Scootland! I’ll have to find a way to record her saying “Okie dokie” because it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard!!! Clare’s very positive, and after an series of inspirational seminars about being your best self and making the most out of your time we’ve had deep hippie heart to hearts about life the universe and everything.

Anyway, getting off piste, the first day Katie, Will and I were doing our minibus training. There were stupid amounts of snow in Les Gets when we arrived. Nothing at all at the airport, until we started heading up the mountain, and then it was just incredible. So in our training we really got to drive up snowy mountain hairpin bends surrounded by locals doing handbrake turns around corners.

I spent 3 or 4 days in Chalet Bacall doing host training with the rest of the Chalet Staff. The chefs were practicing too so I got to enjoy the whole menu – and here I’m talking breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and a 6 course dinner! We practiced welcome speeches and serving each other and started to get a hang on how things will roll. I also went back to the airport to check out where everything is, the different offices, and even got a backstage tour (felt like a celebrity! or someone on those dodgy airline tv shows) so I think I’m all set for when I pick up the guests. Hot tub training was a good one. Not. Quite a rude woman who didn’t seem to quite know what she was talking about and didn't like it when we tried to make it fun…

We also had teambuilding activities and games – but of course most of the fun stuff happened when I was busy doing other training. I missed the bum boarding and wine tasting, but I did get to join the Winter Olympics where I represented Germany; Seb would be so proud!

The best day by far was today. It was the first day off, and we decided to make the most of it. The snow had melted over the week, but yesterday it came down hard, so the chairlifts were opened for the weekend. As part of my job I get a snowboard and a lift pass included for the whole season, but as the season hasn’t actually started the lifts haven’t opened and besides I’m not in my resort yet. But I figured it was about time to get up close and personal with the mountain so I hired a board and Clare and I brought lift passes. 

There’d been big plans yesterday that loads of people would be ready to go to the ski shop at 9:30 when it opened. But the two of us were the only ones who actually made it to breakfast!

Last night we all had a few drinks. We went to a couple of the local bars, including Bowling Bar which no word of a lie has a bowling alley beside the bar! It was a great night but while we were sensible and left about midnight after a couple of drinks we forgot that the majority of people here are either a) 18 and just here for drinking or b) just here for drinking.

So we had the slopes to ourselves. It was the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve had in so long. I think it’s been about 8 or 9 years since I last snowboarded and I wasn’t sure how it was going to go. We said we’d do it slowly together, but when I turned around on the button lift I saw Clare disappearing at the bottom of the slope having failed to figure it out – to be fair we should have started on a simple chairlift… I ended up at the top of the mountain by myself with the knowledge that I had to somehow get myself down…

But it’s like riding a bike.

# destroyed

Back to Adventure

Welcome back! It's been a long, slow summer which has actually flown by. Not much to report from my time. I worked hundred hour weeks in the Watch House Cafe and didn't do much else. Actually that's a lie; in my (very little) free time I helped to build a bouldering centre and got back into climbing, and I took up gig rowing out on the ocean - even got invited to join the racing squad!

The build in process.

The finished place, Rockburn

Rowing out along the Jurrasic Coast.

I won't be joining the racing squad just yet because I've gone and done it again...

I've got a job in the Alps working as a Resort Host for a ski resort!!

I will be working at a resort called Reberty 2000 in Les Trois Vallees - or The Three Valleys to us English speakers. So called '2000' because it is 2000m above sea level with 180 ski lifts taking you to a top height of 3230m over 600km of slopes. So quite a big area =] One of the biggest in the world in fact.

I'll be working for British based company Ski Famille who specialise in holidays for families with young children. There's a big childcare team as well as ski school so the kids are looked after while mum and dad hit the slopes.

Check out their website at Ski Famille to find out about them and see some incredible pictures.

Did I mention the chalets yet? Huge, gorgeous wooden cabin style chalets sleeping between 11 and 17 guests. With their own team of chalet and childcare staff they also have their own chef! Not to mention the en suites, spas, hot tubs, sauna and heated boot rooms… All located in a resort village where you can ski off the slopes and up to the front door.

My job will be to meet and return guests to the airport, arrange ski hire, lift passes, ski school, settle them into their chalets and make sure everything runs fluidly throughout the week. And shovelling snow, taking kids to ski school, dressing up as the company mascot Monty the Marmot (and probably an elf over Christmas), and  running to the store to pick up potatoes (apparently they always run out of potatoes!). I'm the go-to girl if anything needs doing, and the jump in if anyone is sick/injured etc.

And it goes without saying that I'll be testing out all 600km of slopes, the 4km toboggan run, Speed Mountain the longest luge in the Alps, the race courses, the air pillows in the fun parks and maybe even the pool in the village…

It's going to be a bit different from my last two winters spent on the beach in Australia!

Tune in to see how it all goes. And to see some photos to make you very jealous, I know you all like to see them =]

2 years later (from the beginning, not the last post)

This month marks 2 years since I set out for America and started my travels. So it's finally time to wrap this up and get on with a normal life. For now at least.

Bunny and I left Australia at the beginning of April and with a stopover in Singapore made it back to Heathrow the day before I had left. I can't describe how amazing it was to see my family, my dad especially, I'd missed him so much while I'd been away. 

I spent a few weeks in the Midlands, catching up with old friends and family. And sleeping. Lots of sleeping. It was very strange to have a proper bed again after months sleeping on an inflatable mat in a tent! To have my own space again completely threw me, it was so quiet! 

My wonderful grand poppa who turned 98 while I was away.

I was back just in time to help my big brother and his beautiful girlfriend move into their first house. I helped them move into their last place in Battersea so it was only right that I do the shuffle of goods down to Reading too. It's quite incredible that they have brought a house!! The biggest thing I owned was an inflatable sleeping mat!

And then because I had so much fun moving them, I helped move mom too. Since I left the country she painted my room, got a lodger, sold my car, quit her job, re-homed our cats, sold her house, went off to work in portugal, brought a new house, pulled it apart and put it back together again. 

We drove to the storage lockup in Leicester and piled everything into a rented van for a long drive south to Bradpole in Dorset, just on the edge of Bridport.

We plonked everything into a house with no floors, no curtains (we're still using the lovely floral ones from the old lady who lived there before), no shower and no furniture as most of it had been sold at the last home. We've had carpets put in, the shower works now (mostly), we've painted the walls, spent HOURS building badly instructed flat-pack furniture, had a sofa delivered, and basically put the place together bit by bit. 

Living in Dorset is stunningly beautiful. We're just a 10 minute drive to the sea. Unfortunately there's no waves, but i'm hopeful for spots round the coast. If you've seen Broadchurch, a hit BBC series with David Tennant and Oliva Coleman, you'll be able to see exactly where I live now. 

It's a stunning place, but it's very isolated. Without a car I can't really get around. I brought a bike so I can get further than on foot, but heading back up to the Midlands isn't easy. 

After a while more of sleeping I decided it was time to get a proper job.

So I found The Watch House, a cafe on the beachfront in West Bay.

It's mostly locally caught seafood, as well as wood-fired pizzas and a disgustingly large range of delicious looking cakes, made in our own bakery. In my first month I was promoted to supervisor, so now I'm in charge of things like ordering supplies and cashing up. I also get to tell people what to do, and they actually listen (!), sometimes. There's some great people working there and we have a lot of fun. I'm learning a lot. Ask me to make you a double shot skinny macchiato and I'll see you right =] 

It's a great place to be with a great vibe, so for now I'm pretty happy and feeling all at peace. 

If I could just stop those itchy feet….