Poisson d’avril

I logged onto Chamrousse’s website this morning to see what I could see on the webcams. (Bill wanted to go again, even though he went yesterday). What I did see was a warning on the home page. I recognized the word attention. And the word poisson. A warning about fish. At a ski resort. I know my French is pretty bad.. then I remembered that in France for April 1 you are supposed to stick paper fish on people’s backs. Tres bizarre.

                        Bill had his heart set on trying one more time to ski with Kaitlyn. Now that she’s had one whole class at the next level up in the ski school. Maybe a little quick.. but we did it.

                        We found a different place to park… you can walk right onto the middle of a run, put on your skis and you’re off. Bill just took our lift tickets over to the recharge machines to buy passes for today. He said as he was standing there he looked down and saw a grate and thought to himself “I hope I don’t drop my Carte Bleu” (that’s our bank card). And, you guessed it, he did.

                        So while Kaitlyn and I got into our ski gear, Bill used one of her tiny rental skis to beat the daylights out of my pole and get the handle off. Then he dug around until he found an old piece of tape off a box. With that, McGyver managed to fish his credit card out.

                        We hopped on the slope and Kaitlyn did much better at following Bill’s directions so she did much better at skiing with him. He tried skiing backwards, holding the tips of her skis in his hands, so that he could force her to snow plow. He said that worked, but he obviously couldn’t see if he was going to run into anybody. Then he tried using one of my poles… he held it out to his side and she held onto it and they went down the hill together. We took the butt lift up a few times and Bill worked at finding the best way to help Kaitlyn get down the hill. He finally settled on skiing behind her and holding my pole down in front of her… like a bar on a roller coaster.

                        Then, Kaitlyn announced she wanted to take the chair lift. So we did.

                        I was skiing along, enjoying the newfound confidence I have on the slopes. Bill thought we were on a fairly flat spot when he let Kaitlyn go on her own. She started speeding for what appeared to be a drop off and I started yelling. She fell long before she was going to reach the edge of the very wide run. But she was so scared by it all she just kept saying she wanted to go home.

                        So after a handful of runs down the bunny slope and one time down most of one easy run, we stopped. I think we spent more time driving to and from the ski resort than we spent skiing. But it is just incredible that we live so close, that didn’t really matter.

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