J2Ski Forum Posts and Replies by AllyG

Ise,
What an interesting list! The only thing I can do in the whole list is a clove hitch :lol:

I do not intend to even ski down the side of the piste without an instructor. I well remember your horrible story about an avalanche only yards from the edge of the piste, and the threads about all the equipment and training one needs to ski off piste.

But I must say, like Bandit I do find insurers very annoying. We pay a lot of money to insure our business assets and for things like employers liability, and every year they send me masses of paperwork with lots of very small print and I really don't understand it all. They never seem to do anything commonsense like give a short summary of what it actually means.

I suppose one way to deal with them would be to write a letter explaining exactly what one intends to do on the ski slopes and ask them if this is covered by their policy.

Ally

Hi TM,
There's a list of ski resorts near Geneva here:

http://www.j2ski.com/ski_resorts/Airports/Geneva.html

I don't know about the other resorts, but Chamonix is open until early May, although it may not fulfill your other criteria.

Best of luck with finding somewhere - going with several generations of the family sounds like a great idea :D

Ally

Hi Sm4sh,
It's nice to see you again :D

I wondered where you'd gone :?:

Ally

Hi Ise, nice to see you back again :D

Thanks for that link Bandit :D

I couldn't get to see the full text, only the abstract, but I could get to see the full text of this one, in Pediatrics - an American paediatric journal, which suggested that perhaps children are less affected, not more affected, by altitude as compared with adults (although their sample was quite small).

http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/123/1/1

48 Swiss children and adolescents were taken rapidly up to 3450m for 3 days and studied in a laboratory (poor kids - some holiday!). Only 38% of them suffered from mild altitide sickness, as compared to 84% of adults also brought rapidly up to a similar altitude at a different location. The kids mainly suffered from fatigue and sleeping problems.

I know that when sleeping and ski-ing in high altitude resorts I suffer from; feeling tipsy (Kaprun), becoming very short of breath with physical exercise (La Rosiere), and insomnia - waking up at about 3 a.m. (Val Thorens). I was much better sleeping in Courchevel 1550 last year.

I would suggest the most dangerous thing about these mild forms of altitude sickness is that one can become very tired and confused towards the end of a long day without realizing it, and therefore more prone to make mistakes and get hurt.

I wonder if anyone has done any research into comparing accident rates for good skiers in low and high altitude resorts on, say, day four of their holiday.

Ally

Hi Finn,
That's really awful :cry:

It's a lot of money to lose. I hope you get some of it back. Is it going to affect your holiday, or will you be able to manage?

Ally

Hi Wasley,
It sounds to me like you need a transit van or people carrier for that number of people, but I'm sure our taxi experts Ian and Tony know the answer to that one.

I think you're very sensible asking for recommendations for a reliable taxi company. I was in Borovets a few years ago and Bulgaria was a pretty rough place then - much lower safety standards etc. than we have here.

And, when we went our plane was diverted to Plovdiv - have you thought of a back-up plan for that? Luckily we went with Airtours and they simply phoned the bus company up and told them to go to Plovdiv to get us instead of Sofia.

Ally

Thanks Finn and Dave,
It is nice to be right sometimes :D

I hope no-one has lost too much money. Hopefully most people will only have forward booked a few hundred pounds for their holidays, not thousands of pounds.

It does make one wonder why they were allowed to continue trading, when the Investors Chronicle had flagged them up as high risk.

Ally

Val Thorens do a special cheap deal if you go before the 18th December - 155 euros per person for a 4 person self-catering studio flat. This includes 7 days accommodation and 6 days local lift pass but not flights or transfers.

The VT tourist board website is www.valthorens.com and their phone number is +33(0)4 79 00 01 06. They speak very good English and I found them very helpful and the flat we got was fine - typically squashy but okay, very good value, and well located.

Edit
I forgot to ask - how many people are going?

Ally