On the Monday it was time for me to move on, to LDA the place where me and Ali forged our friendship and to visit the place we, and so many other blessed seasonaires lived and worked in our little mountain paradise. I knew it was going to be tough going back there and saying goodbye, Ali was in LDA for 15 years, always there, so to go and him be absent was just weird, but as I drove up the mountain towards the town one of his favorite songs by the naked and famous came on Spotify, I smiled as I realized he was still there in spirit and always would be. I hadn’t been back to LDA since 2018 when I swapped the mountains for the desert, but it was where my season career really started back in 2007 when I was first posted there by Crystal ski, and remained for 3 winters. Even as I moved around the alps in pursuit of career progression I was never a stranger to LDA and went back on the regular, sometimes you wanna go where everybody knows your nnnaaaame :-) and so many of my dear friends have never left which has meant more dogs and babies to meet every time I go back and thriving businesses they’ve built from the ground up to go and enjoy.
LDA is a notorious party town with some of the best bars the alps has to offer, and despite the summer normally having a more chilled vibe, it was still business as usual on the night life front.. so who was I to fuck with tradition? I went straight to my friend Arron’s, who was as usual nursing a sore head after the previous evenings festivities and was as usual not so happy to see me and allow me to invade his space. As usual though, he got over it and we cracked a bottle of left over rose and got ready to get loose! It was awesome to catch up with everyone, so many old friends are still there living their best lives within that magical community of reprobates, hearing their stories of lock down LDA style made me pretty confident that town was not a bad place to be riding the covid coaster.
As with all nights out in your mid 30’s the thrills left me with a relatively severe hangover so me and Arron wallowed the next day shying away from any glimmer of sunshine that judgingly peeped through the windows. I didn’t want to spend my trip being nocturnal and missing the days adventures so I opted for a chilled evening the following day catching up with my dear friend Dan and getting acquainted with his adorable puppy Ila. Although she’s a mingle between Beagle, Golden retriever and husky and hence in essence a true mountain dog, she hadn’t yet found her thirst for exploration so Dan and I spent a hilarious half hour walking/ dragging her round a 1km circumference of the town bribing her with treats to cover a little ground. After I left Dan’s I went to spend my first night solo in the van, he offered for me to stay in his spare room which in hindsight would have been a much better idea but my stubborn soul wouldn’t allow it because I’d come to the alps in my van and I wanted to experience living in it! When I packed the van France was experiencing a ‘canicule’ or heat wave, and one thing I really hadn’t considered was snow, but the weather in the mountains fluctuates a lot and this is something I really should have known after spending a decade living there… However. I had only packed my old sleeping bag that’s accompanied me on a bunch of south east Asian jaunts, central American bus journeys and made uncountable homemade dens on airport floors whilst I await the connections from the long lay overs that come hand in hand with extremely low cost flights. Let’s just say, as reliable as its always been on tropical adventures, this time is wasn’t fit for purpose, it would probably have been more use as toilet roll, because that’s about how thick it is and I’m pretty sure it would flush. I woke up at about midnight and could see my breath misting up as I exhaled, no amount of shivering could kick start my internal central heating and I was cold to the bones. I took inspo from a friends episode I’d seen in lock down and put on ALL of my clothes, including my down ski jacket and wrapped myself up in Pablo the trusty Mexican blankie my mate Nick had lent me, but despite now looking like a cross between a sausage roll and a bird in a bird in bird some posh folk have for dinner on Christmas day, it was still Baltic. At about 3am out of curiosity I looked at the temperature on my phone and it said 6 degrees C. I had well and truly touched the void on my first night in the van.
Needless to say I didn’t get a lot of sleep that first night.. I was somewhat disappointed at my piss poor planning and was questioning whether or not I made a terrible mistake and wasn’t cut out for van life after all. At about 6am the sun came up and I got about an hours sleep. But my bones were so cold I was stiff as a board and decided the best way to loosen up was to go for a trot on the trails to one of the spots me and Ali used to run to a few summers ago. Once the blood started flowing I was fine and started to muse to myself about the failed first night. I reached the spot which is directly opposite the Muzelle overlooking Venosc as the sun was rising to peek over the top of the mountains. I just sat there and listened to some of our old seasonaire anthems while soaking up the beauty of the hills and crying gently to myself whilst wallowing in the whirl pool of emotions I was experiencing ranging all the way along the spectrum from grief to gratitude, and feeling both youthful and capable and old and helpless all at the same time.
I didn’t want to wallow too long in my own thoughts so I said goodbye to our spot and started the trek back to town, my spirit required some caffination after the rollercoaster of the last 24 hours. The universe must have had a day of adventure in store for me because randomly Arron hadn’t gone out on the town the previous night, which was incredibly out of character! I suggested we went for a hike and he AGREED which has to be the first time in our decade of friendship he has ever committed to doing something active.. what a blessing! So we dowsed him in high factor sun cream, cause he rarely sees the light of day and set off down the hill towards Mont de Lans, a town about 5km below the altitude of LDA, Arron was up for this route because he had a friend there he wanted to meet. Although all we had to do was navigate our way down the hill to a spot directly below we got lost a number of times, he also thoroughly enjoyed threatening to attach me to the electric fences to check if they were switched on and regularly reminding me that I literally had no hope in hell of getting him to walk back up the hill once we’d reached our destination. I didn’t care, I’d got him out on a hike, in the day time and it was magical. The wild flowers were in bloom and the sky was the intense cobalt blue that I’ve only ever seen in the mountains, the colour I’ve missed so much since I moved to the faded dusty skies of the desert.
After a couple of beers in the sun down in Mont de Lans we realized we’d lost track of time and it was 5.30pm, the last lift departing back to LDA centre was at 6pm- missing that lift was not an option so we ran to make it (another first for Arron) and safely ascended back up the hill. Arron’s one and only hike of the summer complete. I went back to Dan’s for dinner that evening and we walked the dog round the local bars our friends now proudly own catching up with people on the way. A movie called ‘The Gods of Egypt’ came on the TV and although we didn’t pay much attention to begin with we quickly noticed how fantastically shite it was and were very quickly totally absorbed, I love a crap movie and this one scores an impressively low score of 16% on rotten tomatoes- I totally recommend you take the time to watch and laugh at it. I told Dan my touching the void story from the previous night and he again offered me a bed at his, but I gratefully settled for a duvet instead because I wasn’t ready to quit on van life on day 2!
I made it back to the van about 11pm and after the days adventures I was totally shattered, having the duvet made a huge difference and I had the best sleep until at around 2am someone thought it was a hilarious idea to climb on top of the van and start jumping around, which not only woke me up but also scared the shit out of me. Instinctively I called Arron and shouted down the phone at him! I was furious he thought it was funny to jump on the van and wake me up because I’d missed the night out, but he quickly reassured me he was on this occasion wrongly accused and was still in the pub. He came round to check on me on his way home, and by then all was quiet and I drifted off back to sleep wrapped up in my super warm duvet.
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