Happy Birthday to me!
We are taking Calthorpe Park School from Fleet ski-ing
today and although this is a job I enjoy I don’t feel like going away today. At
least I will have until early afternoon at home.
It is also Good Friday.
I pick Brian up at 15:30 in Aldershot and then we drive
to Folkestone where we shall meet the coach driven by Roger from Calthorpe.
I love this trip because I know the staff very well and I
can treat it a bit like a holiday as there is no driving once we arrive in
Italy.
Paul Edwards is the organiser and he is here with his
wife Jo and 5 year old daughter Imogen, known as Immy. The other teacher is
Tommy Taylor who apart from supporting Spurs is a great bloke. I get on very
well with them all and first took a ski-ing trip organised by Paul to France in
1990! How we have aged in the last 23 years!
We are only half full so plenty of spare seats. There are
only 20 in total.
We are booked on the 19:43 shuttle and join the queue for
the terminal at 18:00. It is very busy as we drive up the empty lorry lane and
join a queue at the ticket booths. This takes ages as we inch towards the
terminal and fight to find a place to park. It is heaving and most of this is
caused by the 2 hour delay we have been told to expect! Not happy with this at
all, especially when we have a 16 hour journey ahead.
I don’t mind travelling on the shuttle as it is an hour
quicker than the ferry but when it is very busy they can’t cope. These delays
happen every time at peak holiday dates.
By the time we are allowed to the loading area to join
another queue and then actually loaded onto the train it is 21:30!
We drive off the train in Calais at 23:13 local time and
begin our journey to Italy via France and Switzerland.
Nothing much to write about the journey other than the
weather was dry and clear all the way to the Swiss border at Basle (about 8
hours driving) but once we entered Switzerland it started to rain and didn’t
stop until we neared our destination of Tonale, in the Italian Alps, where the rain turned to snow.
We arrived in Tonale at 14:45.
The coach is parked alongside the hotel and is not needed
until next Saturday morning! Brian will go out one day and fill the fuel up and
I also offer to take any injured children to hospital but hopefully we won’t be
needed.
Lunch is booked for us in the hotel and as soon as we
arrive we all pile into the cafe part of the hotel and enjoy a freshly made
pizza. Not a
It is snowing heavily now as we traipse along to the ski
hire shop to grab our equipment. I have my own boots so only need ski’s and
poles and with there being so few in the group it doesn’t take long to organise
everybody. We all have lockers in the hotel where we can keep the ski-ing
equipment.
We are staying on a full board basis and the food is very
good. Every lunch and dinner is a three course meal with four choices per
course as well as an extensive cold
buffet to help yourself from.
As soon as we walked into the restaurant this evening the
head waiter pointed to me and called me Chelsea! He does like his football.
Am very tired so straight to bed tonight.
The only problem tonight is that Brian and I have to
share a room, something neither of us wants to do, but hopefully it will be
sorted tomorrow.
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