Trip Report: Savoie, France (Part 1)

Two weeks ago, I posted about my favorite place, Timberline Lodge.  While Timberline still holds that title, the Savoie "department" of France puts up a very good fight.  I spent Christmas there, in a town called Albertville.  The area ridiculously mountainous, and for a mountain-lover, it was a beautiful place to spend Christmas.  For example, the view out of the apartment where Ken and I stayed:

On the other side of the apartment, across the street, there was a store that sold pain.  Delicious, fresh pain (bread) that smelled great.  I learned how to order pastries and coke products at the pain store: "Une tourmillion chocolat coco, et un coca 'cherie', grand," was one thing I ordered.  A funny pastry with chocolate and coconut, and a large cherry coke.  Our pain shop across the sheet:

We went on a number of day trips, and I will talk about each until I get bored.

Annecy

Annecy is a small town full of canals:

Annecy is also full of nougat.

We walked through the town and had lunch, and I learned to order apricot juice (jus d'abricot).  Ken's mom, Jane, bought me a nice hat.  Here I am with my travelling companions (sans Ken, taking the photo).  Ken's parents, Rick and Jane, are standing next to me, and one of their friends, Jan, is standing next to Jane.  I'm sporting my new French hat.

Annecy is on a large lake surrounded by mountains.

The town also has a bunch of these bizarre-looking French trees.  The branches look like they have knobbly fists.

We saw these trees all over the region.  Something about the way they are trimmed made them look unique.

Mont Blanc

The next day, it was time to visit Mont Blanc, apparently the tallest mountain in the French Alps at nearly 16,000 feet.  We took a train up the mountain.  I think there were three main summits.  Here is a very pointy one, named Dru.

Wikipedia claims that some climbers lugged a statue up to that summit.  I cannot verify.  Another summit:

If you zoom in by clicking on the image, you can see some extremely pointy areas.

One glacier on Mont Blanc is called the "Mer de Glace," the "sea of ice."  Here it is:

Here's another view from up there:

If you zoom in, you can see that someone snowboarded down that slope, after hiking up.  Spot the snowboarding track:

After looking around, we boarded the train back down.

Views from the train ride down:

From the train, we could also see the large valley that we drove through on the way to Mont Blanc.  At the very far end of the valley, you can barely see the ski slopes that will host a downhill ski championship in the future:

Here's the view from back where we came from, once we were down in the valley again.  In the foreground are Ken and a French guy named Jean-Marc, my intrepid skiing guide who led me skiing through the Alps a couple of days later.  Mont Blanc is in the background.

Endless French Food

An interesting property of my trip was that, after 24 hours in the country, I ceased to be hungry.  Entirely.  The next time I felt hungry was on the plane going home.  It's not that the food was bad -- the food was, on the whole, delicious -- it's just that everyone kept over-feeding me rich food.  We'd eat multi-course meals nearly every day.  And after a meal, we'd wait the minimum amount of time that it would take for me to even consider consuming more food, and then we'd eat another huge meal.

Example.  A typical meal, which we ate the first, second, and third days of my trip (before my body revolted against the rich food and I tried to detox on simple pasta and salad dishes), would go something like this:

1. An "amuse-bouche" -- an appetizer.  Caution: may contain fois gras, cheese, and various things with cream sauces.
2. First course.  Fish, shellfish, or possibly more fois gras.  Fois gras is a very Chrismassy thing in Savoie, as it turns out.
3. Second course.  Lobster, beef, rooster, pidgeon, various other interesting things.
4. Optional third course!  Choose from previous list.
5. Cheese course.  They bring out a huge platter of different types of cheese, and you choose a few you want to eat.  Pieces are cut off and put onto your plate.  Eat with bread.
6. Dessert!  A tart, or possibly a Christmas log cake (see picture below).
7. Optional second dessert!  Aaaargh!
8. Extra little dessert snacks, such as Christmas chocolates, or candies or marshmallows.  
9. Coffee.
10. A small glass of liquor (preferably the one made from local flowers, Génépi), "to help digestion."

All courses are served with bread, cooked the same day.

On Christmas eve, Jean-Marc and Brigitte cooked us dinner.  Given that I don't eat sea urchin, smoked fish, fois gras, scallops, or lobster, and given that they served us all of those, I think I did quite well.  I ate everything and cleaned my plate.

I was dubious about the whole thing from the time I heard what we would be eating, but once the second course (scallops, in their shell on a bed of rock salt) arrived, my doubts vanished.  The dish looked so impeccably beautiful that when I saw it, I knew there would be no way I couldn't like it.  Sure enough, it was delicious.  It helped, of course, that Jean-Marc was very, very French and thus paired each course with a different wine that complemented the food perfectly.

So, as I said, the food was great on the whole.  But after a few days of eating like this, my body couldn't take anymore, so I started ordering simple pasta or salad whenever possible.  If people were serving me food, I would try to get people to give me small portions by saying "petit petit," but then they would just nod and say okay, and cut me off a huge piece of tart regardless.

The last night, we had traditional fondue.  Delicious.  We were warned not to drink much water during the meal, because fondue is filling.  We should just have a bit of wine, and then some kirsch afterwards for digestion.  I did as told.  When in France, do as the French do?

Coming Up Next

That's the first half of my trip.  Coming next time: skiing in the Alps!  I leave you for now with this sculpture we found in a skiing village.  It is... a very long-legged elephant with a pyramid on top?  Not quite sure.  I guess it's a French thing.

A Slice of Paradise

I think I've finally chosen my favorite place.  Timberline Lodge, OR, where you get ski runs like this entirely to yourself:

Day 1

Allow me to walk you through my family's one-night stay at the Lodge (a Christmas present to me...).  We arrived Thursday morning and started skiing through the snow.

We had a great day of skiing through fresh powder, although we all got pretty wet because the snow turned to light rain at times.  I spent some time skiing through tree glades, which I may talk about in a future blog post.

Here's a route I took, in an effort to understand the appeal of deep powder on a deeper level:

By the end of the day, the conditions looked like this:

Meanwhile, the view out of our hotel window:

As the sun set, we hung out at the Ram's Head pub.  I worked on my laptop, we got dinner, I got a couple glasses of Timberline's own wine, and we played card games.  Out of the window, the sun set over Mount Jefferson and a sea of clouds:

After dinner, we went in the outdoor hot tub and swimming pool under a dark, cloudless sky.

Day 2

I slept restlessly.  Not because the bed was uncomfortable -- on the contrary, the feathertop mattress and mound of pillows was ridiculously comfortable.  Instead, I had resolved to be on the slopes at 9am when the lifts opened, and I kept having dreams in which my alarm didn't wake me up and I slept in until 10.  I woke up twice when it was still pitch black, once when the first hint of light was in the outside world, and finally once again at 7:40am, when I decided to just wake up for good.

The view out of my window:

Not many morning views that can beat that.  If you looked at the right angle, Mt. Hood was framed by ice:

I got dressed and went out to the main lodge area.  I first noticed the view out of the Ram's Head pub.  A picture of the Ram's Head has been my desktop photo for the last 2 months, and I've been wishing I was there for a while.  Tables in the Ram's Head (my happy place):

I found Mom, and we got some coffee from the following coffee pots (notice the background):

Then, after getting Cole out of bed, we all got breakfast.  The selection of waffle toppings caught my eye, so I prepared the ultimate waffle.

Thoroughly stuffed, we hit the slopes, which brings us back to the groomed packed powder.

Unlike the previous day, the weather was dry.

My skiing buddies, Dad and Cole:

Solo shots:

We had a great day skiing.  We skied low on the mountain...

...and high on the mountain.

Here's a path near the top of the Magic Mile chairlift I dubbed "Joy's Cutoff."  Very smooth skiing.

I learned a new skiing trick this day!  Dad taught me how to spin in a circle while skiing, without stopping.  Well, I have to slow down, but then I can spin 360 degrees and keep on skiing.  With time, I became an ambi-turner and could turn both left and right.  Dad's been able to do this for ages, but I'd never gotten it until this second day at Timberline.  With a bit of practice, I could string consecutive spins together.  I would be skiing down the mountain but spinning continuously in circles until I got dizzy!  Since I was feeling silly, I decided to call it the Mayan Infinite Spiral.

We continued skiing until the lifts closed at 4pm.  Near the end of the day, the routes were glowing golden.  Cole and I were both reminded of the course "Golden Forest" from the classic Nintendo 64 snowboarding game "1080."

The last run of the day featured some very smooth snow for me.

Then we returned to the lodge and went in the hot tub one last time as the sun set.  I bought a couple bottles of the Timberline wine, and we departed for Portland as the sun set over Oregon once more.

I just returned from the mountain 6 hours ago, and looking at these photos makes me want to go back already.

Epilogue: First World Problems

I'm going to France for Christmas, and I will be going skiing in the French Alps.  Some of my friends have been laughing at me and giving me quite a bit of trouble for grumbling that I won't be able to spend Christmas at Timberline.  "Joy, Joy, Joy," they say.  "That's not even a first world problem, that's a zeroth world problem.  'Oh no, I can't ski in Oregon, I have to ski in France.'  Come on, be reasonable."

I hope this blog post has given you a slight idea of why I grumble.  I am sure France is going to be awesome, and I am very excited to ski in the Alps, but... it's hard to top perfection.

This morning (day 2 of the trip described above), I woke Cole up briefly at 7:40am and told him to look out of his window.  He looked out at the sunrise reflecting off the mountain, and said, "Wow, that's pretty nice.  Okay, fine, you're allowed to complain about France."