a good re-cap of Bourg D'Oisans

Snow, rain, slush, more snow, card games, rainy days, chocolate, -10°, board games, skiing, pizza, snow, crazy blizzards on a mountain top, frequently stacking it on my snowboard, looking out windows at beautiful rocky peaks shrouded in cloud, hot chocolate and coffee in cozy bars, good times with good friends, windy ski lifts, snow angels... snow...
These are the memories I will keep of our time with Dan and Candide. Their hospitality and generosity to us was so welcoming! We enjoyed every minute of it and will greatly miss their company. Hannah and I enjoyed getting to know Candide better during our visit, playing board games like brandy dogs, guillotine and take it easy together as snow fell on the window sill outside, and Candide even taught Hannah how to knit a beanie which she is wearing right now!
Dan was just as enthusiastic about playing board games and such, with typical b
'Danguage' being used throughout the games like "scumbag!", "work it" and "ma-jassive", always amusing to hear. :-)
The best part of staying indoors though was the food! I have never eaten such amazing tasting cheese before! Or as it's called in France, 'frommage'. We even got to try 'foie gras' and 'raclette', some traditional french quisine.

Bourg D'Oisans, what an enchanting place to live!  It's a beautiful little town of stone walled housed and paved skinny streets all intertwined around rivers and located in the valley, overlooked by huge, domineering mountains. The location is picturesque but with that beauty comes risks and extremes often not thought of by the usual tourist. For Dan and Candide to get to work each day they must travel along dangerous, windy roads that are challenging on a good day, let alone when it's raining or snowing! And if there's any loose rocks on the cliff-faces, roads can be closed completely, leaving no way to get to work or camp etc. Witnessing this first-hand was a great way to grasp the intensity and danger of the French alpes in winter and gave us all the more reason to keep D & C in our prayers during the camp off season.

Speaking of intensity, on Thursday, Han and I decided to go skiing at the place where Dan works, Les Deux Alpes. That place is intense! 3200m above sea level and subject to extreme weather conditions every day, we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves into! After a couple of epic descents and regular crashes on my part, we were exhausted! It's amazing how quickly the cold conditions sap you of your energy, and to think Dan stays out there 5 days a week for 6 hrs or more, I would hate that job! But he does it every week until April and is impressively positive about it all considering the circumstances...

So now we're on our way to Ville Lummiere, the city of light, a.k.a. Paris and are enjoying the speed of travel offered by the TGV with an average speed of 300km p/h! All in all it was a fantastic experience, one that I'll never forget. I think didn't include photos in this blog because you can see all of the photos in the linked picasa web album on the right so have a squiz through them if you're interested in seeing what we saw.

Next blog will be a catch up one on our last two days in Madrid with Phil and Lydia. For now though, bonjour!

Europe/U.K trip

Click on the picture of us if you want to see more pics of our trip!

Our first day in Spain

As I'm writing this, Hannah and I have just finished our highlights tour of Madrid with our own personal tour guide, Phil Lucas, and we're now just waiting for their church service to start.

Seeing the highlights of Spain today were made all the more exciting because we got to see them while riding a scooter around between each one! Phil suggested we get around that way because it'd be quicker and more conventional for all the stopping and parking etc and I jumped at the chance to ride a bike again, especially through the streets of Madrid! So 10 min later we were geared up and ready to go, Hannah riding pillion on the back of my bike and me following Phil like a hawk through the crazy traffic and complicated intersections. What a way to travel!

One of the stops was outside the mecca of Spanish football, Estadio Santiago, home of Real Madrid FC and players such as Ronald and Kaka. In a word, amazing! What was even more amazing was that when we got there we saw that they were selling tickets for a game that night and guess what teams would be playing? Real Madrid vs Barcelona! Biggest grudge match of the country! How could we miss that? So we lined up for tickets, stood in a queue for about half an hour, sent some bragging texts to various mates about how we would be seeing these two teams play, only to find out that the tickets selling for 75 euro were all only single seat tickets spread out randomly throughout the stadium and if you wanted to buy 2 tickets next to each other it would cost 275 Euro per ticket, over 700 Aussie dollars for Hannah and I to go... :-( I was super bummed but as keen as I was to see it, but I couldn't justify paying that much (and neither could Han). So we had to settle for a cozy pub with lots of passionate Spaniards yelling at the Barcelona players on the TV and some warm drinks to keep out the cold, it made for a pretty good atmosphere and a good consolation for the real thing.

After a disappointing loss for the locals we headed back home, me following Phil again but a little more carefully this time because of the wet roads from earlier rainfall. Hannah was a very brave pillion passenger all day, especially since she was frozen half the time! Riding home that night the temp was about 5 degrees!

Well jet-lag is beginning to set in so I'm gonna wrap it up now, need to get some rest before a 3 hour MTB ride with Phil tomorrow... and that's at HIS speed!

P.S. We're no later longer at Phil and Lydia's church, in case u were wondering about the confusing mix up of event orders, I'm writing the last part in the evening after church

A nice river in Spain

My attractive pillion passenger!

Sitting on the donkey of a famous statue in Plaza de Espana

The home ground stadium of Real Madrid F.C.

Queuing up for tickets only to find out they cost 275€ each!!

Warming up over some delicious Spanish Omelette and some wine after a cold day of sight-seeing, yum!! 

Puerta de Sol on a Saturday afternoon, it was packed!!

the square at night

Inside the Irish pub for the football game, sadly the home team lost :-(

A Chinese stop over... for 6 & 1/2 hours!

Well we made it to Beijing in 11 hours but the flight didn't seem that long because we fell asleep for 7 hours of it so that was a great way to pass the time.
We're now in a transit lounge at Beijing airport and are enjoying a quiet rest before the next flights to London.
The transit lounge has a very Chinesey feel to it, especially when you see the wierd snack food they give you to eat. The photo attached was a small sample of the most wider variety of sugar-filled snacks to enjoy (or endure)... Almost all of the snacks are sweet and feel really fake in your mouth, like the 'bun' on the top right which is filled with some sort of custard in the middle. Or the wierd coloured blob things called 'moochies'... there is absolutely nothing natural about those things. They feel like you're eating a glue stick and they taste like nothing at all!
The worst one of all though is the dried, sweetened chicken shreds. They smell horrible when you open them and the taste isn't much better. I steered clear of them after a quick test taste.
Well now that the hotel staff have finally found a powerpoint for phone (after trying about 8 different powerpoints and trying to communicate to me in broken English that they are all not working)
I'm gonna let it charge up so I can blog to you again soon. Hannah's crashed out on the lounge next to me and I think I might do the same...

Bye for now!