Ski Holidays & Ski Resorts with the SNOman

A few words and pictures on preparing our selves, lives and vintage Airstream for a 3  1/2 month tour of the major ski resorts for european ski holidays.

Is that entertaining if you don’t know us? … not sure… but you’ll come to know we three sno lovers and predict for yourself if we’ll be able to go from London-living-townies (him BBC telly maker, her Bank of America IT manager) to some kind of ski-resort/Romany/travelling hybrid… in 10 short weeks…

… laughter… tears… something for everyone!

 

TO-DO-LIST

1 – get Airstream and tow-car ready (see caravan-geek post)

2 – Rent the Putney Flat:

We can’t afford to be away on this mad adventure and also pay the mortgage, so our home must be rented - thanks to Gumtree we managed to do so in extremely short order… to a local young family, spookily similar to ourselves (he’s even a beeb chap)… makes you doubt your uniqueness that sort of encounter… however, they are lovely and need exactly the same duration tenancy as we need to fill (they’re having a big loft extension done and need to be elsewhere with 2 very small children) – Iddi deftly handled the flat renting process and this is a pleasing, if solitary, TICK on the to-do list.

2 – Choose 3 month route through the alps:

It’s a big old drive from London to the alps but once you’re there, all of the major ski resorts in France are within a few hours drive of each other… so the plan is to up-sticks and head to a new ski holiday resort twice each week (approx 3 days per resort).  That will make for approximately 30 ski resorts in 15 weeks.  In my more self-aware moments, I realise that this mammoth number can’t really be achieved, but it’s a great target (that’s my opinion – Iddi thinks it verging on ridiculous).

Idalette has taken control of the route and campsite booking – she’s massively more organised than me and is proving the missing link in the business, as she creates “processes” for things that have heretofore relied on my (unreliable) memory – quite a relief!

 

3 – pack the flat

- essentials for the Grand Alpine Tour go into the Airstream (ski holiday clothes and a spectacular amount of Jimmy kit)

- some baby things go out on loan to my sister who has jus become pregnant with first baby!

- antiques go to safer places with friends and family

- everything else, thanks to our lovely tenants, gets stored in the eaves of the flat – fantastic!

Here is the (lightly scathing) response Idalette gave to my pearls of caravan-packing-light wisdom:

[quote] … pretty straight forward except deciding what to take for three seasons’ weather when you only have one suitcase worth of space.  “Layering” is the answer, apparently!  So I will be wearing summer and autumn clothing together as my winter apparel.  It may look strange, but it will get me noticed and “that is the whole idea” (!)  [end-quote]

Well “layering” has always worked for me.

 

4 – “breaking-in”

A gentle introduction to caravan full-timing in a pleasant Caravan Club site in Surrey.  Here we learned what we needed but had forgotten… and what we had brought that is useless and/or took up too much space.

It also gave me the chance to fix the final bits and bobs (eg make the fridge work, get the www.SNO.mobi logo stickers fitted to Airstream and car, buy and fit the 3G dongle aerial and cable, fit the super low wattage LED strip lights, etc, etc)

Mainly we were able to get used to living in the Airstream, jst as we’ll have to for over 3 months in over 30 european ski resorts – it was a bit of an adjustment but actually… once you know the drills… extremely comfortable and really great fun…

… and so…

as Jimmy now keeps shouting at us…

Lets GO!

Tags: 3g, Airstream, dongle, european ski resorts, European skiing holidays, french sim, mobi, mobicarte, roaming, roaming data, ski holidays, ski resorts, sno, sno mobi, snoman, vintage, vintage airstream, www.sno.mobi

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Airstream, European skiing holidays, Grand Alpine Tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.