Happy Birthday, Juan!

The clouds finally lifted, in every sense, this weekend. Thanks to our “Swiss” friends Antje and John inviting us to use their holiday flat for a night, we had a reason to return to Aussois, in the Vanoise,  last visited with Brian Todd in summer 2011 in unimaginably different summer heat.

In summer the ski infrastructure is a blight on the landscape. In winter – well, I admit it, we had an absolute ball. Grandiose, 360-degree panoramas, with the Ecrins in the far background…

… and views across to the col we’d walked over with Brian in summer:

I may have looked longingly at the ski-tourers heading off to the back country but the isolation of some of the pistes came close to it:

The wide, empty pistes, under wall-to-wall sun, were a joy to ski down…

We managed to ski in perfect harmony for two days together, Juan’s January fall making him more cautious and therefore compatible with his increasingly speedy wife. I even managed to coax him into a couple of the mountain eateries…

Sunday was Juan’s birthday. The wife managed a cake, lit at breakfast so we could take some slices onto the piste!...

 … and Juan had something  to open, thanks to Buff and Colin. (Awesome.)

A wonderful, wonderful weekend.