As always I (Becky) am a little obsessed with the numbers, so here are some facts and figures.
This ski trip was a little unusual, a last minute dash to the alps before Christmas. I had decided to go back to work in the new year and we wanted to get some skiing in before I was tied to a desk. This would make it our second ski trip of the year, a very privileged position to be in.
We spent quite a lot of our time discussing whether we’d made the right decision to ski so early in the season. There had been some very good early season snow, so we had a great start, but the temperature fluctuated quite a bit and great snow was interspersed with warm weather and storms. On top of that, the resorts we visited were only partially open, still preparing for the Christmas period, and Paul in particular found that quite frustrating, although the upside was that it was very quiet (except for weekends, when the locals were out in force).
In hindsight we definitely made a good choice, the 2024 ski season has been very variable and so we had no worse conditions than those experienced in Jan/Feb. In fact it’s only as the season has come to an end that snow conditions are picking up again.
It’s unusual for us to go skiing in the depths of winter and we very much noticed the impact on our ability to generate electricity using our solar panels. The short days and the frequent overcast snowy periods meant that our batteries struggled to cope, particularly with running the blown air heating. We have often talked about buying a generator, and maybe one day we’ll get round to it, but this time we relied on driving down the mountain to find somewhere to hook up and escape the cold.
One downside of our short trip in early season was that we didn’t get to explore very much. We stuck to the resorts we know, high altitude Cervinia-Valtournenche for it’s snow sure early season skiing. And nearby Pila for a bit of variety. Our attempt at exploration in Champoluc was stymied by wind closing the lifts, although we did enjoy a very pleasant snow-shoe instead.
We spent three weeks on our pre-Christmas ski trip. Of those three weeks we only spent 8 days skiing. The rest of the time was travelling, enjoying other activities or taking shelter from the weather. You might think that we could have just flown out for a week’s holiday and got nearly as much skiing in. Possibly that would be true, but we got to pick and choose our skiing days. The extra time allowed us to make the most of the weather and avoid over-straining our legs.
Our total costs for the trip were £2570.90. A key part of our expenditure was the cost of travelling; tolls, fuel, channel crossings, tunnels. It’s a major part of the cost of skiing by motorhome and the reason why we wouldn’t consider a trip that was shorter than the three weeks of this adventure.
After the costs of travel our next most expensive outlay was on Lift Passes, something it is difficult to do without, although there are definitely increasing numbers of ski tourers who eschew the ski lifts and climb under their own steam. It’s something we really fancy trying, but I cant imagine either of us would have the energy to do without ski lifts entirely.
Below you can see the breakdown of our costs and if you want more details don’t hesitate to ask.
