Moose on the Move!

During the winter we bought a little birdfeeder and hung it in the back courtyard to try and attract some birds. All winter nothing came to eat at our diner so several weeks ago we changed tactics and moved the feeder into the garden that runs across in front of our row of houses. Success! There have been about four different kinds of little birds that frequent the feeder as well as robins and pigeons on the ground. It's lovely, and because the feeder is only a few metres from our kitchen window we've been able to take some nice close up shots of the little guys.

Now winter has come to and end and spring is here, or at least it is meant to be.... I think someone forgot to tell the planet. We had a few really cold days here before we went to Switzerland and even had a few centimetres of snow over a couple of days. Not enough to make angels or build a snowman, but you can bet that Chris threw a bit of it around.

I have been making jewellery - mostly for fun - over the past few months. There is a bead store not far from where we live and I have been experimenting with wire and beads to make rings and braclets. A couple of weeks ago I went into a small store here in Exeter with Dayna (our neighbour) and through a bit of careful conversation on Dayna's part we organised for me to take some of my pieces back the store a few days later to see if they can sell them.

I went back to the shop on the 16th March, just a few hours before we left for Bristol, to see what the owner of the store thought of my work and see if she thought any of it might be the kind of thing she'd be able/willing to sell. I ended up leaving it all there! A collection of necklaces, braclets, rings and hairclips. I have to give her a call back in four weeks and see if anything has sold. It's quite exciting. Could this be the beginning of a jewellery empire? Possible, but more likely it will just be a way for me to continue a hobby and perhaps recoup some of what I've spent at the bead store.

So - still grinning a few hours later, Chris and I caught the train from Exeter to Bristol on our way to Switzerland. We had planned to drive up early the next morning for our 7:30 am flight but our Rosie spat the dummy earlier in the week and we had to leave her at the garage. (A new key was the diagnosis and this had to come from France... taking up to 10 days!)

A restless night on airport benches preceeded our hour and a half long flight to Geneva in Switzerland. From there we caught a train to Aigle and from there a cog train up into the Alps to the village of Leysin. A cog train is quite neat. Picture train tracks... they're smooth right? Which means that they are no good for going up hills. So to solve the problem they put down a third track in the middle, this one has lots of cog teeth running along it which the train uses to pull itself up the slope and to slow itself on the way down. Very neat.

The chalet we stayed in was called Chalet Ermina and was in a beautiful spot. Only about a five minute walk from the bottom of the chair lift it was beside an empty plot of land which afforded us amazing views across the valley to the surrounding mountains. However - nothing ruins the first day of a holiday like a night spent sleeping in an airport. No sooner had we arrived at the chalet than we closed the curtains against the views, lay down and fell fast alseep for a few hours.

The following morning we were up early and off to get our boots and ski-lift passes. After asking the locals (who tend to know these things) where was a good place for slightly-rusty-but-slightly-better-than-beginners to start off, we headed almost all the way up the mountain behind Leysin. The views this first day were absolutely brilliant. There wasn't a cloud in the sky and the air was clear, this meant we could see the mountains all around us for miles and miles. We had both rugged up well with thermals and fleeces and beanies and goggles but before long we were both quite hot.

After a few hours of getting our ski legs back we took a break and sat down at the little cafe/bar on the slopes and soaked up the sun. There were some world class slalom skiers taking part in a competition on the slope opposite the one we'd been using. Apparently some of them had been in the Winter Olympics this year. It was scary how fast they came ripping down the hill! We went back to the slopes and after a couple more hours of pracitce on our small(ish) slope we decided to pack it in for the day and ski to the bottom. After carefully considering our piste map we selected our route down and started off. Holy moly! Some of the sections we had to go down were considerably steeper or narrower (or both) than we had expected and we (mostly timid me) progressed more slowly than any truely self respecting skier would do! We both took a couple of tumbles on the way down but evetually made it all the way without serious injury.

That evening we realised that the sun had been a bit brighter up on the mountain than we knew at the time. I guess it was made even worse by our currently pasty English complexions but both of us were sun burnt! Even worse... because we had been wearing goggles almost all day we each now looked like inverted pandas. Who knew you could get sunburnt while skiing?! Well, apparently lots of people did - just not us!

We were reprimanded the next morning by our host in the chalet, she told us horror stories about really bad burns and blisters... eek. So we made sure we bought some sunscreen and applied it liberally all the second day. We went back up to the same slope near the top of the mountain but came all the way to the bottom a couple of times as well. It was a good day - we didn't fall as often and I felt more confident on the steeper sections. This was Sunday 19th and all weekend it had been quite busy on the slopes. Lots of people from all over making the most of the spring skiing over the weekend. It is increadible watching some of the kids coming down the hills. They have no fear and mostly do really well. It can be quite amusing to watch the different ways parents have of teaching their kids how to ski - hands under arms or ski pole across the chest or just leading the way. Watching a whole class full of kids following their instructor down like a kind of centipede on skis is also interesting.

That afternoon we enjoyed sitting on our balcony, sharing some cheese and crackers and watching the paragliders landing on the field right beside our chalet. How wonderful. At this point I will mention the fabulous footwear we had on. I guess partly to keep the place clean, the owner had a rule. When you come inside you take off your muddy/snowy/wet boots, but never fear, there is a whole collection of trendy slippers - and we could pick any pair at all that we wanted to use!! Wowzers! Chris' were quite a respectable black and grey while mine were pale blue and had a little blue bow on the toe. I felt like I should have been wearing hair curlers.

Our third day of skiing was almost as different from our first as it could have been - weatherwise anyway. As we headed up the chairlift it started to snow, it got heavier and heavier until at one point while we were skiing we could barely see anything. It's a very odd sensation skiing in a white-out! It was still a good day and we tried a different route back down to the village. We had thought, looking at our piste map, that the second route down we tried might avoid some of the steeper and less enjoyable sections on the first run. Instead what actually happened was that we had more. Bah! Still we made it to the bottom, smiling and uninjured.

That night we ate at the Cheese Museum in the village (where from 7pm you can watch them making cheese - and get involved if you want) and tried a couple of local dishes. We started with a small serving of Raclette each, it is a dish of boiled/baked potatoes, pickles, pickled onion and melted cheese. Then we tried a first for us both - fondue, (hugely popular all over the world in the 70s. It was a tasty dish but we were both soon very full and heavy feelin gon cheese and bread. I think I had always sort of imagined that you got somthing other than JUST bread to dunk... it was a bit of a surprise to realise that all the people we had seen eating Fondue all week really had been eating just melted cheese and bread. The waitress was a little surprised when we didn't want more bread (beyond the four large hunks we had each already eaten) to finish off the last of the cheese in the pot. At any rate, it had to be better than one of the other popular menu items we saw on several other menus in the village. It seems that "Cheval steaks" (otherwise known in English as "Horse steaks"), were quite popular. We declined to try it. We are obviously not that adventurous yet.

Our last full day in Switzerland was not a good one weather-wise, it was cloudy and grey and a little rainy. Instead of skiing we slept in a little, did a little bit of gift shopping and chocolate shopping. We thought about hiring snow shoes and going for a bit of a hike up to a lookout on a different part of the mountain but the weather was not encouraging. We caught the fully enclosed lift to the top of the mountain instead, a little higher up than we had been skiing. There is a revolving restaurant in dark building of interesting design up there and maybe because it was a quite day they let us buy our lunch in the cafeteria but eat it by the window in the revolving restaurant. It was great watching the white world glide by outside although it would have been even more spectacular had there not been so much mist and fog and cloud between us and the mountains.

That evening we packed up our room at the chalet and went for a last walk around the village. Leysin is different to a lot of other ski resorts in Europe because the village there is actually very old and existed in its own right for a long time before skiing tourists arrived, it was settled in the 6th century. It was primarily an agricultural village for several centuries. The visitors who did come did so because of health reasons. The village is high up, sunny and sheltered from the cold north winds, this position meant that it was proclaimed as a place to go to be cured of all kinds of ailments. In the 1820s many people in the valley began sending their children there to be cured of bone and other diseases. In 1890 the Climatic Society was founded and many clinics were built as a result. This is when things really started to change. The Grand Hotel was built to accommodate patients and people flocked from all over the world to be cured of bone and joint tuberculosis.

Many of the clinics were closed after WW2 and the discovery of antibiotics. This left a lot of buildings vacant and provided the opportunity for the tourism industry to develop which it did during the 1950s. Since then it has become a popular skiing location, but has not grown into a huge resort. The locals here were friendly and and there were lots of school groups that came after the weekend. It seemed odd to us to have skiing as a school subject, but we decided that it made as much sense here as swimming lessons at home. No wonder the kids are fabulous skiiers by the time they're 10!

We had a brilliant time in Leysin and would really like to come back here (or somewhere similar) during the summer months. It must look so very different and beautiful in a completely different way.

Our trip home was a fairly uneventful one, and we made it back to Exeter at a very reasonable time. We were able to pick up our car from the garage on Thursdsay afternoon, with a new key that locks and unlocks the immobilisers beautifully. Unfortunately when we got home we discovered that the old key - which was meant to be dead - actually works again. Hmmmph.