Netbasic Ltd.

Yesterday was the first day back from our annual winter holiday in Meribel, and I’m suffering for it!

The tone for the holiday was set on the Friday night when Glyn accused Sii of “touching his cider up” instead of drinking it - 4 hours of pool and about 20 “cheeky nightcap” cans later the minibus picked us up at Luke’s and dropped us off at the airport bar - just in time for a safety pint at 5am!

We stayed in the same place we did last year. Ome and Regan had moved on to one of the other Ski Cuisine chalets in the area, but we were very well looked after by Dom and Simon!

The skiing was going really well on the first day until we missed the last chair-lift and had to make our way up a bunny slope using perhaps the worst drag-lift in the world. The lift was basically just a rope that you had to hold on to as it pulled you up the slope! The rope was quite taught, and for some reason I thought it would be a reasonable idea to just sit on it rather than hold on. Stack #1. Upon standing up I found myself on the wrong side of the rope with the top fast approaching, so I tried to limbo under it while still being pulled up the hill. Stack #2 and a sore shoulder. 10 minutes and a dizzy spell later we were almost back at the chalet and I was already thinking of afternoon tea and a nice hot bubble-bath. Stack #3 and out!

Unlike my last Superman attempt, no-one was there to film it, and Luke was the only witness, but apparently it was pretty spectacular! I got up and ran it off initially, but I obviously did more damage than I thought as I still well hurt now! My Big Feet got caught up in some slushy snow that I didn’t see and I just took off, landing a few yards further down the hill on my face and [other] shoulder! Everything seemed ok until 2 days later when I could hardly move my right arm at all and a massive lump had appeared on my forehead. I could live with that, but what really worried me was when my eye swelled up like I’d been punched just after I blew my nose one evening [check out the gallery for a rather comical picture of my eyes!]

Face-planting in the snow apparently isn’t all that good for your sinuses!

The holiday was generally a lot more relaxed than it was last year - we discovered that if we didn’t go out and get really drunk every night that we’d enjoy the following morning’s skiing [and the following lunch time’s beer] a lot more! That still didn’t completely stop us going out though - on Monday night, Colin “The Power” Simmonds practically dragged us out for a pint or two, and then left early! What was that about winners and not coming 2nd, Colin??

Then on the Tuesday night there was a Silent Disco in one of the bars that Dom and Simon managed to scrounge up some extra tickets for.

Knowing full well we’d be bundled when the guys got back in, Sii set up some motion sensing software on his mac to record the bundle as soon as our door was barged open. The resulting video is pretty hilarious and showed us that Georgia doesn’t need a snowboard or even any snow to stack it! 20 mins later, Sam strolled back into our room, woke us up and quite unfairly blamed the theft of her jacket that night on The Power: “I put my jacket where everyone else did; even Power got his jacket back” and “The Power is a fieth!”

Wednesday was our host’s day off, so we hit the Rond Point for a spot of apres ski, got in and realised that no-one had the energy to go to the reseraunt Ski Cuisine had booked for us, so instead found the phonebook and ordered a mountain of pizza from Pizza Express and just chilled while watching the footy!

Thursday was the only time we had the entire group on the same slopes all week - we headed over to one of the other valleys to do a really nice red/blue run in the sunshine where Ad “The Turtle” twice stood at one side of the slope and completely accidentally, although seemingly intentionally, picked out a target on the other side [first Glyn then the Power] and set off making a beeline for them! We somehow happened to catch the chaos on camera in the background when he took the Power down - skiis and poles everywhere - brilliant!

Well anyway, we’ll get round to uploading some photos and videos of the trip at some point, but right now we’ve got plenty of proper work to be doing to ensure that we get to go back next year as well! In the mean time, here’s a rather cool panorama we put together from 6 photos using “photomerge” in Photoshop CS3! Best. Software. Ever.