Waking up the next morning was a delight. Completely forgotten was last night uncomfortable feeling of being snowed in. We truly were lost in wonder. A largely unusual, dazzling and rather exotic landscape was stretching out before our bewitched eyes.
S.P.’s phone rang. It was V., his childhood friend, who had settled down in Brittany a couple of years before. V. is a very experienced snowboarder whose only regret after moving definitely to Brittany is being so far away from the Alps.
“We all are very busy”, he said. “But this is something so unusual that I vote for a snowboarding session at Les Tertres. I brought my snowboard over when I moved from Paris."
Where then? Well, in the meadow that slopes down along the garden and ends on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the beach.
Why not?
In brief, we’d have only one snowboard handy but we could convert one of our many wakeboards into a sled… This is called being resourceful. Now the only problem we had was finding the right and very warm clothes to have fun in the deep snow for a few hours!
It was sunny and yet much colder than the night before. We have no mountain/snow gear in Brittany for a very good reason. We had to be inventive, adding up layers of sweaters, slipping on waterproof boating pants over our regular pants and for lack of anything better, we put on very old pairs of snowboarding socks (meant to end as polishing stuff for ages). The brilliant finishing touches were rubber boots for some of us…
V. arrived without further delay, on foot and carrying his snowboard. He doesn’t live very far away but the narrow road was blocked by snowdrifts. Snowdrifts 800 meters from the beach!
He insisted on wearing a mask since he is a very active sea rescuer and does a lot of training in teams even in wintertime. Remember, those were harsh Covid times.
Our first move was to pack down the powder snow and make a couple of ski runs of sorts. Snowboarding is a very serious undertaking. No ski-lifts though, which is something that our V. remarked upon when tasked with the chore of preparing the grounds. There were several tries. And then we all had a field day that lasted for a few hours!
