my left foots

l'Usine. What can i say?
It's very cool to suddenly have a whole load of new routes to try and I'm sure they will not be ticked easily. The scene down there in Grenoble seems to be kicking, I was surprised that there were other climbers at the crag 2 of the 3 week days we were there. Access to the cave was easy and as drytooling venues go! its an ok place to hang about.

After my crap journey to the comp and climbing on sat the next 3 days were spent resting and getting a taster of Jeffs nails route "Bichette Light" I was thinking it might be feasible to climb sometime in the future, then I found the correct start (not the M8 right hand start i was doing) and was suitably humbled.

Malc spent mon/tue trying "God Jull" and "l'Usine" then had to fly back to Denmark. The drive back up to Lyon airport was not too bad and luckily it gave me another chance to try and take some photos of Lyon Airport Station by the architect Santiago Calatrava. I love the building but the photos need another visit and i need to buy that lap top more than ever.


Lyon Airport Station by Santiago Calatrava



After the airport as I was in the area with my fixed skis and new boots I drove back down Alpe d'huez.

Day one was good after a slow start.
Day two was shite, my boots were giving me all kinds of grief while snow and flat light made seeing the slope impossible (don't know how the hundreds of other skiers managed) so after skiing over my other ski and twisting my knee i slunk back to the car.

Every cloud.... finishing skiing early then leaving in daylight (before another couple of hours of snow fell) made the journey back down the hairpins just about acceptable. I wish that I had found out quicker that I had put the left insole in to my right ski boot and vice-versa though. I did quickly find out that the 15 pound part worn "winter" tyres did not cut the mustard, to be fair they are better than a standard tyre but no where like as good as the chunky treads you see in the mountains. Later that night I was back to tyre worship as they did a great job ploughing through the slush laying on the A6 and getting me to the winter forest surrounding my sisters before midnight. It was an early white christmas lunch that weekend.