My first snowboarding holiday did not start particularly well. Our group was greeted at the airport by a jovial, dreadlock wearing, Kiwi who was to be our driver for the long journey to our resort. It quickly transpired that Flaine was the only resort in the Alps to which he had never previously had need to take his rising inflection. This did not bode well as the last time I got in a taxi with a driver who did not know where they were going it ended with us having a high speed head on accident. That was in Northampton. The potential for things to go wrong in the Alps was far higher.
As we turned off the motorway and started the long snowy climb towards the resort, which he had now pin pointed on a scruffy piece of paper he had found in the door pocket, his actions caused me to wonder if he was either a supremely confident driver or just supremely lazy. In one of the first villages through which we passed there were long queues of vehicles parked up on either side of the road. He briefly turned down the hip-hop, that was distorting the speakers in the mini-bus, just long enough for him to shout across to us.
‘I should probably put my chains on eh?’
You reckon?! Four coaches and about twenty cars parked up at the side of the road, all with people crouched next to them, struggling to fit tangled snow chains to cold snow filled wheels, in a blizzard, is a fairly good hint!
I am sure his feeling of smugness at passing them at high speed soon evaporated when, about five minutes later, he had to ask his eight terrified passengers to help him stop his mini-bus sliding off the side of the mountain.
When he was finally forced to admit defeat, by virtue of not being able to progress any further up the mountain due to a lack of traction, the front seat passenger had to slide across and put his foot on the brake pedal whilst our hero got out to fit the snow chains. This served to only slightly retard our rearward progress towards the edge of the abyss. It was reminiscent of the final scene in the ‘Italian Job’, where the coach comes to rest perched precariously on the edge of the precipice.I had to get out and use the light on my mobile phone to allow our now humble driver to clumsily fit one snow chain which enabled us to crawl to the relative safety of a lay by to fit the other.
Whilst I stood and shivered and dodged suicidal Frenchmen in Renault Clio’s who were coming down the mountain at great speed and consequently sliding into the bank of snow alongside the mini-bus, I was humiliatingly forced to watch as the coaches and cars that we had passed earlier whisked their passengers skywards towards a hot chocolate and a hot shower.
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