So we have had a fantastic ski holiday. Maria has gone from being a little apprehensive because of her boots to loving every minute. She is now desperate to get back on the slopes.
After our last day of skiing I have had to clear quite a bit of snow from around the van, including an area for us to turn around. There is also a lot of ice under the van but he comes off the pitch with no problems.
We have decided to leave early, you have to leave the camp site before midday or you are locked in and charge an extra day. So it is before 10am and we are coming off the site, 
The staff are back in their big snow ploughs and are clearing up the six inches of overnight snow and one of the snow ploughs blocks our path – I vaguely remember a similar scene at the start of the Italian Job and that didn’t end too well for the sports car. Today we’re all playing nicely though with the snow plough moving out of the way so that we can leave. The snow chains have been left on the front tyres from when we arrived so we have good grip as we proceed downhill through the tight little roads to get back to the exit. 
Knowing that the roads are excellent once you get out of the resort we decide to stop early to remove the snow tyres. This isn’t as mad as it sounds because the motorhome is fitted with snow tyres which have been fine until the conditions get a little extreme. As expected the roads are excellent as we head through the villages and back down the mountain to the motorway and being a Friday the traffic is light.
Quite often when we are travelling, Maria is very happy and singing songs and we have the videos to prove it. However, after quite an energetic holiday with a fair bit of apres ski and dancing, Maria is a tired bunny and spends most of start of the journey asleep. Looking around, the cats seem to have suffered the same so I am the only one awake with my music gently playing.
It doesn’t take us long to get out of Austria and of course one of the things we have to do is return the go box (The method for pay paying motorway tolls for vans over 3.5T in Austria). I stop at a petrol station and go to the go box queue to see how much of my €70 of credit I will get back. Last year, when we went to St Anton, i received a few euros but part of that was my fault when we stayed on the motorway after missing our exit. This time however, we get back over €60! Result.
Maria and the cats have woken up but Maria is paying the penalty as she has to sit there with two cats on her lap since they both want their mum. You may wonder why Maria, in the picture, has a large pillow on her lap and a cushion underneath it. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the cats like to spread out and Clyde in particular is a big cat, he needs the pillow to give him enough space. The cushion helps to keep the edge of the pillow up so that he doesn’t fall off the front, definitely something he would do. The pillow also provides protection from Bonnie’s claws. She likes to pad on her mum’s legs and she has claws like needles. Sometimes, Maria forgets the pillow and I am reminded when there are several gentle screams as Bonnie gets herself comfortable. I usually have to stop the van to get the pillow for her because Maria doesn’t stop after a few minutes but just continues to do it.
As well as checking out what is going on in the world, Maria also has the task of identifying where we will stay overnight. We want to be four hours or so from the Eurotunnel which means a reasonably long drive on the first day. We decide to go through Luxembourg which will be another country for the cats to tick off :). Maria finds a really good site adjacent to a fire station with electricity and other facilities. We will be stopping at a reasonable time too. We arrive as it starts to get dark but all five spaces are full. We could find a spot to stay but we don’t want any trouble or to be moved on so we decide to go for another site.
Maria finds another site at Herbeumont. This looks quite good with a mixture of hard standing and grass and it can take 53 vans so at least it won’t be full. It’s a fair distance away and after about 30 minutes we arrive to a sigh that looks like a crime scene. A lot of the village has red and white tapes cordoning off large areas of the grass. As we find the site, we notice that there has been a lot of rain in this area maybe there has been some kind of show because everywhere is covered in mud. 
There is not a single van in the site, is it closed? At least it is secluded 🙂 it is now getting late and we are going to be leaving reasonably early. So we are staying but we are not going to risk going axle deep in the mud. So I stop on the hard standing in a quiet spot and we start to get dinner ready.
Since we have stopped, the cats want to go and explore the area. This is going to be a bad idea but the constant moaning is eventually enough to get Mummy to let them out knowing we will pay for it later. Within thirty minutes there is a little scrapping on the door and Bonnie is asking to come in. Bonnie has grey stockings naturally and so you know she is filthy but she doesn’t look too bad. She still gets the full cleaning treatment with a damp cloth and towel! There is then a loud thump on the step as a big cat jumps on it. I open the door to find a brown cat. Clearly not Clyde because he is white. But, it is the size of Clyde and makes lots of noise just like Clyde. Oh no. This clean up operation is a lot more work and more akin to when my parents used to clean their dogs in Spain after a winter’s walk. We get rid of the worst and the good thing about Clyde is he is meticulously clean but he will have his work cut out. Of course five minutes later, as we are eating dinner, Clyde is moaning at the door to go out – absolutely no chance, mate. Forget it and sit down.
It’s an early night, for us because we want to get on our way early in the morning, do some shopping and then get an early train so that we can be home by early Saturday evening.
The next day the drive to Boulogne is uneventful although we do pass Waterloo, nothing to do with ABBA, Amanda Furber ! I was very interested in history when I was a teenager but I have never been, funnily enough Maria has, and we agree that we will take a weekend and go there at some stage.
The route we have taken has again been toll free after leaving Austria and we have even been able to find really cheap fuel so it hasn’t been bad at all. We are now thinking whether we should try this route down to Italy but it a slight detour and the tolls to go through Austria are high, so maybe not.
Now you can’t leave France on your way home without stocking up on “essential” supplies and despite being on a diet which means we are not drinking wine (and won’t for a few months yet), we decide to stock up at Maria’s favourite, Auchan. I am always a little apprehensive about parking in the large hyper markets. 
The motorhome needs two parking spaces and still slightly overhangs and of course you need more space to swing the back out to turn out of the space. For this reason I normally park quite a way from everyone. I used to do this when we had a Lotus Elise so that people didn’t park close and ding the doors. Whenever I returned to the car, it was like an island of cars with the Elise in the middle. I guess people just wanted to look. Unfortunately, it seems the motorhome is the same and despite having parked with eight spaces around me, I return to find cars on all sides. This should be interesting.
Maria and I load up the wine and some other supplies and I ask Maria to stand at the back of the van to check the rear corner doesn’t get too close to any cars. One thing that has shocked me about the motorhome is the brilliant turning circle. I fully expected to be constantly doing three point turns but the lock is unbelievable. Of course the other side of the coin is that the large overhang at the rear swings out a lot, hence Maria’s role. Surprisingly, we have nothing to fear and the van comes out of the space perfectly in one take and I can wait for Maria to come back into the van before driving off. Top safety tip, don’t drive off without her. Nothing will happen to you in the van, at least until she catches you up at which stage you are dead meat. Fortunately I am enough of a gentlemen to not drive too far and she is back in the van with the cats patiently watching her and waiting for the pillow to go back on her lap!
It isn’t long to get to the Eurotunnel and with pets on board the first job is to check in the cats. 
The rules for cats are very different to dogs at immigration as long as their rabies is up to date. The process is very simple. Surprisingly, there aren’t many cats travelling back to the UK so Bonnie and Clyde are normally quite popular with the staff. Another advantage of going to the pet check in is that sometimes, when there is a queue, you actually bypass it quite effectively but today, despite there being cancellations, the queues aren’t too bad. The cancellations mean that we can’t get on a very early train though, despite arriving at a good time, so we will be waiting a little while. Oh well we tried.
The train journey and drive home are uneventful and we are back early evening which allows us to get some food. We decide to finish off our holiday with a meal out, at Aqua 8 in Ipswich which is a nice Asian fusion restaurant and the people are also very close to our good friends in the China chef in Colchester. This means great food and a lovely chat too so a perfect end to our holiday. We try not to regret it too much the next morning though when we discover that we have gained three pounds in a couple of days. That’ll be the lack of exercise whilst still eating and drinking but at least “easy on, easy off”. We’ll be back on the diet tomorrow.
We’re home with a day to chill before returning to work. It’s been a great holiday but I guess now we just need to go back to work to pay for it.
So our overnight load is not great, even with the fridges and everything else running we shouldn’t take more than 10% of the total capacity or 20% of the available capacity running throughout the night. I get up in the morning to find our battery monitoring reporting 0% capacity! Have I inadvertently left something on? I check everything and there are no problems. Running the generator during the day gets the batteries back up but it seems very strange.
Ollie from Seapower usually does our electrical work and unfortunately with me and Maria working hard at the moment, we can’t afford the delays while we sort this out ourselves. We just need it done and can’t wait for me to get back late from work, reorder, wait and then fit. Ollie comes on board and wires us a temporary solution while the plug is being delivered and also checks the batteries.
On arrival, you could see there had been a lot of snow already this season but over the space of the next 24 hours, there was two feet of fresh snow! That will sort out the holiday. As the snow came down, visibility was poor but the advantage of having two weeks skiing is that you don’t feel as bad if you miss a day and don’t feel obligated to go out in any conditions! It’s the first Sunday and so we decide to walk down from the resort to the village, exploring our surroundings and getting a feel for what is available. But first we have to get out of the van…
Also the weather has closed the links from Fieberbrunn to the other parts of the ski circus so we would be limited to local skiing anyway. We’re up late in the morning and Maria agrees to go into town again to get some shopping for the next couple of weeks. So it’s another walk and we arrive at lunchtime, the town is closed again! But at least the supermarkets are open. Of course we can’t get too much shopping because we have to carry it back, but at least there is a bus that drops us off back at the ski lifts just above the camp site. So two days in and we haven’t done any skiing yet but that doesn’t stop “skiing injuries”. In places the town is very icy and Maria’s all weather boots are not as gripy as they could be, she slips over four times over the two days and bangs her knees quite hard. So we haven’t even started and Maria is injured already. We’re worried that Maria is going to struggle to “bend zee knees” as she used to hear regularly from her ski instructors. Of course a way around this is to apply some kind of ice pack. Or lay in the snow. Or do a snow angel in the snow…
Unfortunately, I still have to do a little work and I am on a few calls with our main software suppliers and the execs from the Trust where I am working. That doesn’t take too long and a little effort now means I can relax for the rest of the holiday.
In fact she does several runs, hardly adjusting the boots at all. Best of all, is that with the weight loss, Maria is more than comfortable to bend down and adjust her own boots, not the easiest job sometimes. It means I am not on my hands and knees at the top of every lift.
We know exercises you can do to get the quads sorted but in our experience there is nothing you can do about painful feet. So day three and we decided to ski over to Hinterglemm. The lift we get up takes us past the camp and we can see the motorhome nestled in looking up at us.
Maria is enjoying herself as we take the last lift up to the bubble lifts to return home. It’s been a good day and the boots are working exactly as you would want. But it has been a much harder ski and Maria can feel it in her legs.
Then we look at the decor….there is a painting behind the bed, two naked people talking the talk of love, there are statues of naked women…you get the idea! No? On our little tour of the room, the lady shows us the TV with DVD player. There are two DVDs, the history of skiing, available in German and English. Alternatively, there is a dodgy shoe-fetish porn video! No prizes for guessing which was in the machine :). But if I’m honest, I didn’t know that Mathias Zdarsky first skied in Austria in the early 20th century…. or that some guys find stiletto heels sexier than quite attractive young ladies!
On this day, we have agreed to meet a friend of ours from the marina, Grahame. He is skiing with some friends and with Maria’s new found energy and pain-free skiing, she is keen to do more. We’re back off to Hinterglemm where we meet up with Grahame and friends before having a ski around the area. We intend to stop for lunch but time is ticking on and it is after 2:30pm when we eventually stop. 
We’re about to order food but just as discretion is the better part of valour, we decide that cowardice is the better part of discretion and get the lift back to the returning bubble lifts. We’re not sure how long it will take to get to the lift and food may just make us miss the last lift! Needless to say we get there quickly and leave with 40 minutes to spare.
4am to catch his flight. Anyone who knows Matt will realise how difficult that must have been! But it is one of his loves and so sacrifices have to be made. After a few runs it’s a relatively quiet evening because we have big plans for the next day.
But before all of that, Matt and I decide to clear the remains of the snow from around the van as preparation for our departure at the back end of the week and to avoid the icy path around the van from becoming a death trap. I borrow a large snow shovel to start moving the snow and Matt sets about the icy parts with various tools. It takes quite a while to clear all of that snow from around the van but at the end we feel accomplished and have done a good job. It certainly prepares us for the spa experience.
Some people have asked what do we do with the cats when we go skiing. Well, while the mice are away, the cats will play and we generally get back to two tired out cats with all their toys strewn all over the van. When we return, we always let them out and Clyde is keen to explore his surroundings but 
Bonnie isn’t one to go out in the cold and will pop out but within seconds returns to the warm. Clyde likes it outside so much that quite often we need to walk around the site calling his name to get him to come home. And five minutes later he will be moaning to go out again. During the day the cats are actually very settled, they have their spots in the van and they like being near us when we get home so everyone’s happy.
However, Snowflake, as Clyde has now been termed, is loving the snow and getting covered. He just doesn’t care.
bought some cheap and cheerful directors’ chairs with Mariadz on the backs. These are lightly made and don’t stand up to much punishment, or time, particularly. In fact we have gone through a few sets of these as they have fallen apart. Being a bit of a hoarder, I have generally salvaged what I can from the broken chairs to use as spares for future chairs. However we always decided that, before we go, we would splash out on some well made, sturdy chairs that will last. Unfortunately these cost nearly ten times as much! So that expenditure hadn’t been prioritised….
We knew what we wanted and so went to the London Boat Show earlier this year with the intent of finding these chairs. We rarely do to this show any more because there is hardly anything there, preferring the Southampton boat show, but we were in luck and stumbled across their store. The boat show price was good and we were also able to get Mariadz embroidered on the backs in gold, I’m assuming real gold. These chairs are built from harder wood which is thicker, feel sturdy and good quality and are light years ahead of the old chairs. The cushions are very comfortable although we also had other options on these which Maria had to think long and hard about. It means that we spent More than an hour choosing exactly what we wanted, and this also included having to find our friend Dan to give us another opinion! When you consider that we knew exactly what we wanted before we arrived, this sounds even more ridiculous. They are now in pride of place in the saloon. This has presented me with a couple of problems: Maria now looks at the upholstery in the saloon and wants to change it to match the colour of the seats and they are so nice I am loath to put them into the lazzerette for fear of damaging them. Now I need something to protect them! Maybe another bag….
topper for a king sized bed which went over the top of the mattress. This worked well and stopped us being eaten by the gap in the bed. It also meant that we slept on something new rather than on someone else’s bed. I know you do it all the time in hotels but somehow it feels wrong when it is your own bed.
This wasn’t the cheapest option but we were keen to have a long term solution. Julie-Ann at Passmore was really helpful since we were keen to have a joined up mattress with two different halves. The split is needed to allow access to the storage and machinery (aircon) under the bed. Despite the knowledge that they would be a perfect size we were still keen to have a zip joining the two mattresses together and since nobody wants to sleep on a zip, a cloth cover over the zip to make sure the 
bed was comfortable. The visprung beds are quite firm and there was an option to go extra firm which Maria toyed with, in the end we are grateful that we went with “only” the firm mattress.
Maybe like their ginger friend…..
As you approach the centre of Brussels there is a beautiful building in front of you, the Basilique Nationale de Sacre-Cœur à Koekelberg, which looks magnificent. It guards the entrance to the Tunnel Leopoldo II. It is very pretty, thank you Sam for showing us this……. and then we have a 2.2metre height restriction on the tunnel! Sharp turn left, since that height would take off our heads as well as a lot of the van, and turn around. We had not come too far so we probably only lost 15-20 minutes with the detour before we are back on the by-pass and safely on our way to Cologne.
To be fair they have been great for the entire journey with Clyde spending a lot of time on Mum’s lap and Bonnie sitting up high keeping an eye on things. Obviously except when she also wants some mummy lap time – they really are awfully big cats to have on your lap for a long time. They are incredible really and never bother the driver, although Maria doesn’t get any rest!
”. I trudge down the hill and explain to Maria that we have to get our new snow chains out and fit them quickly, and this will be our first time. Fortunately I have a large old cardboard box that I can lay out flat on the floor to provide me some protection against the snow. We have them out of the box and I vaguely recall how it works from the time we test fitted them onto the land cruiser a few years ago, the instructions are the same but it will take some time. At this point a very kind Austrian gentleman came down the road we were blocking and seeing our predicament and our confused faces, took control. He had clearly done this many times before. He had them fitted in minutes and we did some roll forward and back tests before tightening up and we were ready to go. Maria tried to ply him with a very nice bottle of red wine as a thank you but he would not have it and left us with only our gratitude – aren’t the Austrians nice!
getting dirty and damaged by being exposed to the elements. This will only get worse when we are full time sailing. The solar panels provide some kind of shelter like a car-port but to protect it properly we needed a cover. Once again dolphin sails were chosen for this work and Paul Gray helped us to design it so that we can also use the rib for light storage on passage, by adding a zip in the section closest to the yacht. Clearly we can’t put too much weight up here though! We don’t want to put a strain on the davits or tip ourselves over….
For a number of years we had discussed a piece of art for this wall, inspired by the Moody Mornin’ Gorgeous that we looked at when we bought the Moody 54. In fact we had previously commissioned a picture from an artist in Long Milford of our last yacht, the Dufour 455. It was amazing as he put together various different elements to form a picture of “our” boat that had never been taken. The picture was good but a few months ago we went to a small exhibition at Ipswich marina of a local artist, 
We have a picture from our first weekend sailing which is a dynamic picture of Mariadz sailing at 8.5knts down the Orwell. We asked for the enhancements we had made to be included such as the solar panels and the rib. In response, Anne had said no outboard on the rib… “they’re ugly”, we also discussed whether the water should be “Orwell brown”, perhaps not! 
The first sketches showed the power of a yacht and really teased us as to how the art would look. A few short weeks later and the work was done. Anne had deliberately made sure that the painting didn’t look like a photograph and the key to knowing that it is an original Anne Plummer is that there are cat hairs within the painting. More proof that we had the right person!
Mariadz 