Skiing - Again!

Twice in two years. We are clearly forming a habit.

Alpe D'Huez this year, along with the Hurdleys, the Marshal-Thomases, Simon, Mel, Tom and Claire.

Just for the full picture, here's a link to Dan (Hurdley's) Flickr set of the holiday

The kids got lessons from ESF and were doing really, really well by the end of the week. Lenny had his 40th up there (which was a most awesome day).

Here's the snaps:

Christmas

We were in Hampshire at Imogen and George's for Christmas, which meant travelling through London. So we took a few days to see some friends and do the two things we have to do when we go to London - see a film and go to Yo!Sushi. We saw "Up" in 3D and ate popcorn. Check the groovy glasses:

We stayed a t Gran and Pampa's for a few nights and most mornings we got a visit from this really friendly fox:

I mean, it's not too often that you can sit next to a fox and take a picture, albeit through a glass fronted door.

We went for a walk through Richmond park when the weather allowed and the kids fed the ducks and went tree climbing:

Then it was off to Alton for the main event. It was very white down there, so naturally everyone got into snowball fights almost immediately:

There was also this quite frantic episode where we went for a walk and halfway round left the teenagers in charge of the smaller kids while we went on a longer route. Naturally they got lost in a big forest and we had to split up and run around the place looking for them while the sun dipped below the horizon. Found them just in the nick of time. All fine.

One quite strange, but awesome highlight was our present to Pampa. A sphere made up of 216 spherical neodymium magnets. A great toy and as it turns out a great game, too. Once disassembled, it's a non-trivial issue to get it back to being a cube. So we all got a chance to try to put it back together. The shortest time was under a minute:

Ans so it was that we returned to Guernsey for a short rest before going skiing - what a life!