Christmas in Vevey

Yesterday was Christmas of course, and this is generally a big day in our household, even though it consists of only two people, since Linda is a Big Fan of Christmas (although I do admit to enjoying the benefits that come with this)

We had a large Christmas tree, carefully decorated, and food and presents enough to satisfy a much larger family than ours.

After the phonecalls and the first and second rounds of eating, we jumped on a train up to Les Pleiades, since if Winter were not going to deliver us with a White Christmas, then we would deliver ourselves to the white stuff.

We spent our time making an elaborate (for us beginners) snowman.

After taking plenty of photos for evidence, we noticed the clouds closing in and the sun going down, which would have left us shivering on the hill-top, so we ran for the train and went back home for round three of eating.

We still have a lot of left-over Christmas Turkey (we roasted a whole one) and other Christmas food to finish off before we start our drive into Italy tomorrow morning. We may end up taking some with us, although taking Swiss food into Italy would indeed be a strange thing to do.

Skiing at Les Diablerets

On Monday I was officially on annual leave while Linda was still unfortunately at work.

In order to prevent myself from distracting Linda, I bravely took myself out of the house for a day of skiing at Les Diablerets - poor me.

It hasn't snowed in a little while and the snow was quite hard-packed so I decided to focus on improving my turns.

Having bought carve skis last season, I decided it was time I got better at carve skiing (normally I make short, quick turns, whereas carve skiing requires a more dedicated approach to turning).

With carve skiing you aren't really pushing the snow to the side (which slows you down) so much as trying to cut a smooth line across the slope (which doesn't). Also, the skis I bought are quite long for carve skis (180cm), so they're built more for speed than pure carving. Consequentially I've been going a lot faster!

Lastly, in Australia the slopes are quite gentle in gradient, and short in length, so you tend to make the most of the terrain by doing jumps off rocks, etc. but in Switzerland the runs are steep and long so you focus more on getting up speed and making some big turns.

Then there's the accident insurance my work provides (a disincentive for caution), the fact that I'm not as fit as I used to be, and all this leads to an obvious conclusion: it might be time to buy a helmet...

Mont Pélerin

Last weekend we went for a short drive to Mont Pélerin just behind Vevey for a hike in the snow. The weather wasn't perfect and there hadn't been any snow for a few days so the conditions weren't ideal, but we did have a nice walk through the countryside with our raquettes on.

Probably the most fun part, however, was letting my GPS have its head and allowing it to guide us through some very obscure roads to the starting point of our walk. We ended up following some very narrow and winding country roads through snow covered woods - very nice!