My God, its nearly Christmas already!

The winter is upon us!

Wow, time is flying by and next week its Christmas and the winter is fully under way!

There's a few new faces popping up around Chamonix as the seasonaires start to move in for the winter, the Christmas lights are up and on and its due to snow some more this week (30cm at 2000m and 10cm down here in the valley apparently) so that's all good!

It's been cold, -20 up the midi today, -10 here in Les Houches, where we now don't get the sun until sometime in febuary!

I've managed to get out on my bike a couple more times to power up the legs a bit more. It's cold going down hill but not so bad on the way up especially in the sun. Great to still be out riding at this time of year.

I headed over to Courmayeur yesterday (for a ski with my daughter Manon) and had a quick look around. Like here, they're making a lot of snow cannon snow over there and the pistes have good cover but the artificial snow is quite hard pack and Off piste the base is pretty thin. The new snow coming in this week should change things and top us up for Christmas so we'll wait and see and I'll keep you up to date on how things progress.

Anyone that has been trying to get in touch this week, I'm sorry if we've not been in touch but Ruth had to go back to the UK for a few days and so I've in charge of the office and our girls, hence nothing has been done in the office! Ruth will be in touch early next week so don't worry we'll be back to normal soon enough!

On the course front, they're looking pretty full (from where I'm sitting looking up at the calendar) now up into April but if you see a gap go for it and get in touch with Ruth next week.

I start with courses after Christmas and then its pretty full on through the winter. I'm really looking forward to it, I'm just loving snowboarding more than ever!

I've a couple of new posts on my Q&A blog so check them out and I'm picking up the new McNab Snowboarding long sleeve T's tomorrow so they'll be available soon. They look nice with 'The fine art of riding mountains' across the chest. Look out for them on the goodies page on the McNab snowboarding web site.

Nipped into Zero G (the Chamonix Snowboard shop) this morning to pick up my new board 'Salomon special 2 magnum 166' which was getting a tune up. The shop has just had a full new fit up and looks good, my board looks awesome!

All is good,

be riding with you soon!

Take it easy,

Neil.