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Doing a season in the Alps
| How to spend the winter season in the Alps......and get away with it! |
So you want to ski all season in the Alps but you’ve got a house in England, perhaps a family at school there too, commitments, bills to pay, letters to answer etc etc. You don’t understand ‘the French System’, French bank accounts, the French school system, Insurance and a million other daunting things. Most of all you don’t know where to go to find out about all those things that you don’t know.
As Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defence once famously said about the Unknown…
“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know we don't know.”
(Feb. 12, 2002, US Department of Defence news briefing)
Well, Alan, our Courchnet Snow Reporter, will help you find the answer to all of those ‘known unknowns’ and hopefully a lot of the ‘unknown unknowns’ too on the subject of ‘How to spend the winter season in the Alps and get away with it’. |
| Doing a season: Things to do before you go |
Who pays for this lifestyle anyway?
The first thing you have to decide is the ‘big picture’. Do you want to buy somewhere? Do you want to live in the Alps every season or is this a one off adventure? Can you afford to live in the Alps without any income or do you need to ‘work your passage’.
Well including ourselves, I know examples of all of these. Families who have bought a property and live there for 4 months a year; others where the main breadwinner has ‘saved up a couple of year’s worth of holiday’ and spent half the time in the Alps while the rest of the family remains there for the whole season. I have friends who have simply rented a property for 20 weeks from December to April and put their 10 year old twins in the local village school and I have friends who spend the whole season in the mountain, renting a property and funding the lifestyle by catering for an upmarket chalet operator 6 evenings a week.
Estate Agents
Once you’ve decided your strategy, your first port of call will probably be a French Estate Agent or Immobilière. Let me give you a tip based on my experiences. You will get more response from agents if you make an appointment to see them and then spend an hour with them going through your requirements. Also, make sure you keep in touch with them as you can disappear off their radar if you don’t drop in to their office now and again or at the very least, call them on the phone. Word of mouth amongst other people resident in the village is also an excellent and cheap way of being first in the queue when a property comes on to the market.
There are quite a lot of off-plan properties being sold in France these days which are on a Lease-back plan. You pay less than the market price – you get to stay in ‘your’ apartment for 4 weeks a year – you get some rental income – after 11 years the property reverts to you for your own use. This is to try and ensure that when a new apartment building goes up, each apartment is occupied for all 20 weeks of the season, at least for the first 11 years, to generate greater income for the businesses (shops, restaurants, lift company etc) in the village.
Your UK House etc.
We went out of our way to buy a modern, low maintenance property in England that we could shut the door on, set all the electrics and not worry about. A big old rambling property that needs constantly looking after wouldn’t work.
Our house insurance requires that someone sleeps there overnight at least every 90 days – so we have a relative do that and document it, and of course we pay a gardener to keep the grass and flowerbeds in reasonable shape.
For £43 for up to 6 months, Royal Mail will redirect all of your mail from your UK address to your French address. It simply arrives 2 days later and it’s a brilliant service. So dealing with all of those bills and queries that hit your doormat is not a problem. It’s worthwhile investing in one of those ‘filing briefcases’ that you can get at Staples to keep all your life in some semblance of order while you’re away so that you can put it all in proper order on return (…and find things!).
Insurance and Medical
Get an EHIC full stop! The European Health Insurance Card entitles you to the same standard of care as a French national gets in his own country AND it’s free. Apply online. I had a bizarre illness last season which cost me a day and a half in hospital and some serious medical attention. All I did at the end was flash the card and I got a bill for only €38, exactly what a local would have had to pay.
For ski insurance I recommend unreservedly the ‘Carte Neige’. You buy this from your local ‘Club de Sport’ in any resort in France (in Courchevel it’s in the Forum in 1850) and it costs €45 a season. This covers you for all skiing problems wherever they occur. On-piste, off-piste, lost skis, helicopter rescue, drive you back to England, replace your skis and on and on. If you do hurt yourself, you don’t pay and then spend months filling in forms, you just show the card and it’s done. It’s the best value for money ski insurance anywhere.
Do you need a car?
The ideal is to have an undercover/underground car park that is allocated to you. If you have one of these then there is no doubt that a car is a benefit. You can go shopping, visit restaurants and of course take lots of stuff with you at the beginning and end of the season. 4 wheel drive is a good idea and carrying chains is essential. However I haven’t used chains at any time in the last 4 years. If it’s snowing, I go skiing. If it’s raining, I go shopping!
A word of warning - you must carry the original (ie not a photocopy) of your Driving Licence, Insurance Document, MOT Certificate and Vehicle Registration to show to any Gendarme who stops you.
Tp Tip - for those who take a car to France for the season and use the excellent Toll Autoroutes, go online to www.sanef.fr and rent one of their Liber-T boxes. This is a little electronic gizmo which you put on your windscreen and it lets you drive through the reserved lane on the left at each toll booth or Péage without hardly slowing down. Your associated debit card gets billed at the end of the month. When you’re on your own, have you ever tried to pay using a credit card out of the passenger side window of a right hand drive car? All it costs is a €30 refundable deposit plus €2 a month but only in the months when you use it.
Most car insurances only allow your car to be out of the country for 90 days at a time (at which point you need to cross the Channel, go once round the roundabout at Folkestone and go back to France – achieving nothing meaningful). Pick an insurance that doesn’t have this requirement and also one that throws in European Breakdown – if you’re over 50, Saga Insurance does all this.
Satellite TV
If you have Sky TV in the UK simply take your digibox and card with you and get a local company (Legrand in Moutiers for example) to stick up a dish for you. Should cost around €150. You could also use an internet company like Melksham Satellite who will, perfectly legally sell you a dish, unsubsidised digibox and viewing card, all of which you can take with you and get installed. Don’t EVER ring Sky from your French phone as they’ll see that you’re in France and cut off your TV service, as their service is officially only for the UK.
If you have children and are planning to do a season as a family, then you will also have to consider the following points:
Schools
When I approached with trepidation, my then 6 year old’s UK school to ask if it would be OK if she could take the Spring Term off to spend time skiing in Courchevel we were surprised to be told that it was a wonderful opportunity for her and the school fully supported her.
When we bought a property in Courchevel, we chose Courchevel Le Praz for a number of reasons. Firstly Le Praz is on a level plateau so getting around on foot is no problem at all. Secondly at 1300m with 7 minute access into Courchevel 1850 by bubble, you can always access it by car and yet you have almost instant access to the whole 3 Valleys. I can ski to my back door every day of the season from December to April. Most importantly though, this is a living town with a couple of thousand permanent residents. Consequently there is a butcher, newsagent, 5 restaurants, bars, 2 bakers and a supermarket but importantly a primary school for 200 pupils .
On return to the UK (don’t forget, you have got to come back!), my experience is that there is no problem in maths as the French system is better/more advanced than that in the UK and anyway the 9 times table is the same in any language! General literacy and grammar suffers if you don’t go out of your way to spend some time with the UK school to understand what they will be teaching from January to April. If the UK school is very cooperative, you may be able to take some of the books with you to France. As a minimum, impose some reading in English during the season, even if they whine that they want to go out tobogganing!
Language
Kids can play in any language but also kids can be extremely horrid to each other when there are differences in looks/language or whatever. The earlier the better seems to be the maxim on the language. At 5 or 6 they pick it up very quickly and soon start correcting you on pronunciation and grammar. If at all possible, get your little one invited round to classmates’ chalets after school and offer to take classmates skiing on Wednesdays and weekends. Exposure to the language in a natural environment produces rapid results. Also keep the language ticking over during the summer and autumn back in England with private lessons. You may also like to tell your son/daughter that for 1 hour each day, at a time of their choice each day, the whole family MUST only speak French to each other. This is quite fun as they tend to call ‘The French Hour’ at the most awkward time they can manage… but that’s OK. |
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last updated 12-Jun-2008 |
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