We left The Pheasant at around 3:30am and headed for Bristol. Those of us who had never flown from Bristol before, and indeed many of those who had, were expecting to find a cow shed in a field for an airport. However, following the recent completion of a brand new airport terminal, to our great surprise we found a true international airport awaited us with facilities to match more established regional airports such as Birmingham and Cardiff.

No delays were experienced on the flight and everything was going smoothly on the travel front until we arrived in Geneva, boarded the transfer bus and had to hang around for about an hour for a load of scousers to join us from another flight. During this delay Carpy did his best to ensure his space was not invaded by repeatedly emitting an evil smelling forcefield, those sitting in the proximity were not impressed. Once our bus was all scoused up we headed across into France to Les Menuires where our arrival in early afternoon was greeted by a bright blue skies and sunshine.

The location of the Hotel Skilt was superb with a distance of only a few yards from the front door to the snow. Inside the hotel the rooms were fine and the food generally good, in fact, compared to the previous years culinary offerings in Sauze d'Oulx, the food was superb. A bonus for those hiring equipment was that the ski hire 'shop' was located within the hotel itself and run by the British hotel reps, so there was no necessity to trek across town to find that obscure little ski hire shop packed by hundreds of skiers from different hotels.

The Sphere Bar, which soon became known as The Severe Bar, was next door to the hotel and run by our reps and became the natural evening meeting point. The Severe Bar staff were always pleased to see us reporting record takings for the season for the first night we arrived. A varied array of shops, a bank and a supermarket adjacent to the hotel made it an ideal venue for the week from a practical point of view.

One thing we hadn't bargained for was that it was French half-term resulting in the whole of the three valleys being more crowded than usual, however, with so much skiing area at our disposal it was fairly easy to avoid the crowds by heading off for Meribel, Courcheval, Val Thorens and La Masse. Arguably the best skiing was to be found at Orelle on the Italian side of Val Thorens. Orelle is not the easiest place to get to involving a lengthy wait for Le Caron gondola and cable car to get to the peak above Val Thorens, but the inconvenience suffered getting there was well worth it. Once at the summit there were numerous fast wide pistes to be found, with great snow, leading down to the best restaurant we discovered all week half way down the valley. A few off-piste fields and mogul runs were also available to keep the likes of Bud, Martin and Kaz happy.

The team aerobatic display was led, as usual, by Carpy but without doubt the most entertaining flights came from Turk whose ability to cut trenches in the snow with his face led him to become known as 'The Plough' for the majority of the week.

The social scene tended to revolve around the aforementioned Severe Bar and a couple of live music venues one of which had a resident French band whose excellent female vocalist disguised herself as a sheep every night with an unflattering array of woolly jumpers. It was into this music bar the girls descended on Thursday evening when faced with a third straight night of European football involving English clubs on big screen TV in the Severe Bar. By the time the lads arrived after the game it was not a pretty sight, Jo was engaged in her own one-woman performance of indecent exposure, Jenny and Karen were engaged in a very close encounter of the deep throat kind, Lorna was re-arranging the bands equipment following an unscheduled stumble into the stage while leaving the dance floor and Shelly was dancing on the tables with anyone under the age of 15. Marian was doing a valiant job of refereeing the proceedings but as a contest there was only one winner and that quite clearly was the Vodka.

Quote of the week came from Siobhan who one day was heard to utter the words "Blimey, isn't there a lot of French people here".

On the injury front, Hensh bit off far more than he could chew on day 1 when he followed Fez, Maz & Co into a black mogul field resulting in him temporarily joining the airborne division and injuring his ribs when he finally returned to Earth sideways. Luckily the injury was not bad enough to prevent him skiing the rest of the week. Tankster also had a bad experience in a mogul field; one he didn't realise existed until he was in the middle of it. Once Tank's ankles realised where they were they were having none of it resulting in a fall that kept the big man off the slopes for a day. Unfortunately for Matt McGann he suffered a twisted knee on day 2 which ruled him out for the rest of the week.