Nine of us went to Val d’Isere and spent a week having fun in blizzards, blazing sunshine, powder and pubs. Sadly we had to come back. You’ll find more photos on Flickr.

Irish Tanya and Anne sand-boarding near Kalbarri. It was ace fun – a lot like sledging, but without the getting wet, cold and miserable.

See more photos taken on 26th May 2006, or all of my photos from Australia and Brunei.

I do it every time I go on holiday. I’m fine up until the last day, and then for some inexplicable reason I fail to apply sunblock. As a direct result of this, my cheeks and the tip of my nose are currently a somewhat different colour to the rest of my face. To me it says “No worries, you’ve just spent the week snowboarding in the Alps”. No doubt to the rest of the world it says “FREAKAZOID!”.

See, I’ve just got back from a week spent playing with my friends in the snow. Charlie drove Gary, Emma, Rob, Brett and myself down to Les Coches in his fantastic VW Transporter Caravelle Minibus thing, where we met up with Neil, Simon, Pete, Owen and Anne.

I spent most of the first day desperately trying to remember how to ride a board. The first run we did – a steep blue from Les Coches to Montchavin – was a nasty bugger and I spent most of the time falling down it. Luckily things got better quickly and my confidence grew quite quickly from there on in.

By the end of the week I was joining Charlie, Gary and Brett on their mad off-piste adventures. Our final run of the week saw me have a fantastic crash in the trees. Tired legs got things wrong and I ended up lying with my head pointing down the hill and my board caught behind a tree. Escaping that one would have been interesting had Charlie not come to the rescue…

There’s loads more to tell (the dutchmen, Brett’s rock trotters, the flirty waitress, Si’s cooking, the fosters girl, the flashing bouncy ball, the world’s hottest fajitas, the list goes on…) but it can wait for another day. You can find a load of pictures in The Gallery.

• One trip to Noah’s Ark.
• One Nitro Magnum .61 Snowboard
• Pair of Salomon SP3 Bindings
• Pair of Salomon Dialogue Boots
• One vastly reduced bank balance.
• We’re going in to the Alps in less then two weeks! Much wootage!!!