Are You Feeling Zen Honey?

Hi everyone and welcome to the latest post from your favourite blogging Méribel Ski Instructor. It's been a busy couple of weeks since my last post, and the weather and snow conditions continue to evolve during the early spring period. Two weeks ago I skied three days with Sparkie. Sparkie and I have skied together several times over the years, including a 'make or break' situation in January last winter. We had great success last year, and she wanted to keep the momentum going this season.

Sparkie emailed me just after New Year asking if I had any available time on a particular given week. Fortunately I had, and we penciled some time in. She had explained that she had skied over the New Year period in Switzerland and had had a rotten time of it, and was hoping to not lose her confidence again.

We had lovely snow conditions as you can see in these photos, which of course help with confidence. Having said that we had a few moments of horrific bad visibility that Sparkie called 'pea soup'. We made a few technical and tactical tweaks with her skiing, which soon put Sparkie right back on track again. The three days went way too quickly, but it was great to see Sparkie on such good form.

I then had several mornings skiing with a lovely nine year old girl called Ottilie, from Toronto in Canada. She was good fun to ski with as we worked on perfecting her parallel skiing on blue pistes. The thing that she loved doing the most though was sniffing out the rollers and any jumps. This was all fine in my mind as long as it was done in a safe manner of course, something that we had to chip away with. One lasting memory of skiing with Ottilie, was her description of slushy snow, she called it 'gooey'. Love that.

Next up, Team Rappaport from Manhattan in New York.

This has been the third set of skiers from the United States that I've skied with this winter, something that's becoming a little more common. We discussed this, and they confirmed what I had heard from other Americans recently. A ski holiday in Europe can now cost the same (including long haul flights), and often less money, than having a ski trip in America. Doesn't that sound mad?

The brief for our four days together was to ski guide them around the three valleys, and take them to their mountain restaurants that had been reserved by their hotel. Speaking of which, they were staying in the Hotel Coucou, which opened about five years ago. I thought this was only a name, but in fact Coucou translated from French means Cuckoo the bird. Quite often you will hear parents or older relatives say the word coucou to young children, like a slang way of saying hello.

Anyway, I digress. It was great hearing various stories of their previous skiing holidays in Europe and of course in America. They have skied a lot on the East Coast north of New York, and close to where they stay at weekends in Connecticut.

Their daughter Brook and son Drew, sixteen and eighteen years old respectively, are cracking good skiers. Over the years they have both done a lot of alpine ski race training, especially at the Catamount Mountain Resort. Drew in particular has competed to a high level, and you could really see this when he was skiing with his family, and especially when I was guiding him alone.

It was a fabulous four days with them, and I always love spending time skiing with Americans, being exposed to their language and enthusiasm. There were many occasions on ski lifts, or over lunch, when I would pick up some sayings that made me smile; 'Are You Feeling The Zen Honey?' was one example, another was 'Thanks Honey Bunny'. When we were skiing in very flat night, I heard Drew say to his dad, 'You've Gotta Feel It Out'!

Earlier I mentioned that Canadian Ottilie called slushy snow as gooey. Well, Lisa from New York calls slushy snow 'Mashed Potato'. Thinking about it, this makes perfect sense both in appearance and texture.

I'm back skiing with Sam for a few mornings, this will be the third spring skiing trip here in a row in Méribel that we've skied together. I've got to dash back to the UK for a family event in between these sessions. Hopefully my skiers tan won't look too silly, as much as I've applied and re-applied the factor fifty, I still resemble a matchstick at the moment! Right, that'll do for now. As ever, don't forget to Live With Passion. Martin.