Yesterday afternoon the kids and I drove up to Chamrousse to see if we could watch any of the Snowboarding festival.  I was skiing up there on Thursday (side note: hard to beat skiing with a friend who has an extra ski pass) and we saw this massive snow park that they had set up.  I looked it up online -and found some rather sketchy info, with very little details – but it was a beutiful day to be outside, the kids finished their homework in the morning, and Susan was at a retreat all day – so we figured we’d give it a shot.

We drove up – and found out that we were allowed to hike up the hill to the snowpark.  Sounded easy enough – walking uphill in soft, slushy snow apparently can wear down small children.  But when we got there it was quite impressive. There were dozens of competitors – in what seemed like it was more of a ‘friendly festival’ than a real competition.  Tonnes of people sitting around, music pumping out (pretty sure my kids heard more english language gansta-rap over an hour or so yesterday than they have cummulatively thus far in their lives. Also pretty sure if it was an english-language environment -you wouldn’t get away with playing those lyrics in a public setting….)

We sat in the sun watching these guys – who came in teams of four – and some of them were quite amazing.  It was +10 up there, and the sky was crystal clear – so it was a pretty nice day just to sit and watch.