J2Ski Holiday 11th January 2015 Sauze d'Oulx

The woman who owns it is English.

LOTA wrote:I stayed in the Hotel Sauze once and it was the drabbest place ever. But that was in the 1970s! :)

Well, it must have improved a great deal since then! :)

It was a real shock to the system last night having to cook my own supper, with no fancy chef prepared 4 course meal waiting for me :(

elovabloke wrote:The woman who owns it is English.

Well, I was e-mailing both the Italian and the English versions, one under the other. Maybe our e-mail got spammed or something?

Anyway, we were very comfortable in the Sauze, and the price was excellent - 480 euros per person for a shared room on half board including the 6 day Via Lattea lift pass. And then we paid for flights etc. on top of that.

My train tickets were very cheap, St Pancras to Oulx for only £120 return. And the bus from Oulx station to Sauze was only 1.90 euros and I got the ticket in the shop next to the station. I've forgotten what the RER tickets across Paris were - but something similar, and I bought them on the Eurostar.

Edit
I double checked this, and we did finally get a reply back from the Stella Alpina and they were already fully booked for our week, even though I contacted them months in advance :(

In reply to Lizzie-B's query on another thread, yes we do have videos of our ski-ing during the group holiday, which we will hopefully be able to get up on here.

I've also got 3 hilarious ones that the Ski Club of GB guy did of our group on Friday, and it includes 3 of us from the J2Ski group holiday. I suppose I should get permission first before posting it up. It's on my memory stick. The leader, Chris, did say he would be posting them up on the Ski Club of GB website but I haven't been able to find them :(

We also have more group photos which I'm trying to get sorted.
Here's one that the car group took the second day they went to Orelle, on Wednesday. There was so much snow that the skiers amongst them couldn't really cope! ;)

Luckily they'd pisted the place by the time the rest of us got there on Thursday :)

Ade73 took this one of J2Skier Joe Colin in Orelle

Here's one of Piste Paul's photos of the 5 in the car group by the dolphin pool in Sauze. They flew to Geneva because they wanted to fly from Bristol, and then hired a car there to drive to Sauze, which later came in handy when they went to Orelle.

Ade73 is the boarder in green, the woman skier on his right is his wife, Spencer D is the J2Skier with the red jacket, Joe Colin is the J2Skier with his ski up, and the other guy is a friend of Ade and Spencer.

I wanted to ski for 8 days, and go by train, so I needed to stay in a hotel in Sauze for an additional 2 nights.

There was no availability in the Sauze hotel so I looked for another one that wouldn't charge me too much for a single room. I picked the Edelweiss hotel in Jouvenceaux on the outskirts of Sauze and booked it through booking.com although it is also available through Neilson as part of a package holiday.

Jouvenceaux is a very strange place, from the little that I could see of it. It seems to be just houses on a very steep hill with a ski hire shop and a cafe that you pass through on the way between Oulx and Sauze. But it does have its own chair lift which goes up to Sportinia with a mid station on the way. It's what I would call a long walk from Jouvenceaux into Sauze up a very steep hill. However, the hotel does run a free shuttle bus up to Sauze in the evening for those guests who want to go out at night.

The chairlift starts at the bottom of the nursery slope which is just behind the Edelweiss hotel, so if there's enough snow you can ski down to it from the hotel - something like 100 yards I would guess. And the ski hire shop is across the road from the chairlift.

On Monday morning, before I went home, I had a stroll around to get a look at this, and saw one poor couple from another hotel trying to walk down the extremely steep hill to the chairlift in ski boots!

And I also watched a couple from the Edelweiss trying to ski down the unpisted slope to the lift, and one of them fell over! I should imagine this is normally pisted as there's a travelator at the side. I'm not sure, but I don't think the piste down to Jouvenceaux was open even by Monday. When I was there on Saturday night and Sunday morning the week before there was no snow there at all - it was just mud, but by the following week it was covered in snow and the snow cannon had been going all night (outside my bedroom window) on the nursery slope.

The staff in the Edelweiss were very helpful and one of them drove me and my luggage around the place when I needed it :)

I got to the Edelweiss hotel on Saturday night on the bus from Oulx, stayed there for the night, packed my stuff and left it in the hotel for them to drive it to the Sauze hotel when I phoned them after I'd finished ski-ing, hired my skis, went up the Jouvenceaux chairlift and skied all day.

And then a week later I had the opposite problem - I packed my stuff when everyone else went on Sunday and left it in the Sauze hotel, skied all day, returned to the Sauze (they even gave me a cup of tea and cakes!) and then phoned the Edelweiss hotel to come and get me, my luggage, and my skis which I needed to return to Gros Sport in Jouvenceaux before staying the night in the Edelweiss. And then in the morning they very kindly drove me to Oulx station so that I didn't need to catch the bus.

I was very impressed at how kind the staff in the Sauze and the Edelweiss hotel were at helping me shift hotels :)

And, to compare the 2 hotels, I would say the Edelweiss had larger more modern bedrooms but the food wasn't as good as in the Sauze. And it would be pretty annoying for anyone who wanted to join in with the Sauze night life to be stuck out in Jouvenceaux, even though they do give you a lift up there in the evening because you have to walk back. But the Edelweiss would be almost ski in/ski out if the nursery slope had been pisted and the travelator was going.

The single room in the Edelweiss cost me 70 euros per night half board (supper and breakfast) which I thought was fairly reasonable - not cheap but not incredibly expensive either.

Oh, and I was very pleased because I did make quite good use of my limited French during the holiday, even though we were in Italy. I found quite a few people during the week who could speak French but not English, like my 'chauffeur' in the Edelweiss who was quite chatty once we realized that we could both speak French :)
And I got a chance to ask about the snow conditions in Montgenevre from some of the Italian piste patrol who could speak French but not English. The staff in the cafe by the station at Oulx could also speak French so I could order a take away lunch for me to have on the train.
Plus, of course, when were in Orelle and Val Thorens everyone except the non French visitors could all speak French, and most of the people on the TGV between Paris and Oulx seemed to be French :)
I like to talk to people, and I get very annoyed with myself when I can't speak their language :(

Piste Paul's photo.

Here's Old Boarder, coping with the icy pistes in Sauze on Monday or Tuesday before it snowed.
I think we all found the ice hard to deal with. One of the group went into the ski hire shop to ask about sharpening the edges of his skis, and the ski technician guy said loads of people were coming in to ask about this and the edges were fine - it was the ice that was the problem! It was pretty scary not being able to stop or turn on the ice until you got to something less hard and slippery!

I admit I took my hired skis in for sharpening, but only after several days of ski-ing on the ice, and they said they did need doing and I paid them 15 euros for it and the skis did seem better afterwards :)

I had very nice fast piste skis - Rossignol 9GS size 168 cm which were very good at fast, stable carving :)

I went really fast on them down the last part of the red run to Sansicario, the one they call the Olympic run. It's a great place to do this because there's a steep section just before it flattens out and it's nice and straight so you can see what you're doing and if there's no-one in the way you can just take the brakes off :)

He must have been hot with all that gear on

I am impressed that you managed to get a pic of a boarder standing up ;)