In early Jan 2013 we finally booked our next snow holiday - after a 2 year gap (and having only been on my snowboard once in that time which was over a year ago).
The destination of choice was a little alpine village of Vaujanay close to Alp d'Huez, picked because it was very cheap (approx £500 for flights, transfers, accomodation and lift pass) but also whilst being away from the slopes (as it usually the case with the cheaper holidays) it had a high speed cable car taking you right up to the top of the slopes in the Alp d'Huez area which meant avoiding the queues up in the higher resorts.
A week before the holiday I went along to the Tamworth snowdome with one of my mates who was part of the holiday party to have a quick hour on the slope. I had only been on a board once in nearly 2 years so it was good to get my feet back in and remind myself how it was done (also I was on a wholey new board). By the end of the hour we were raring to go (& sick of avoiding people on the busy slope!)
At this point I should mention SnowTrex (www.snowtrex.com), the company we booked through - they did a good job of booking our flights, transfers (which included the traditional bens bus followed by a taxi up to the main resort), accomodation and lift passes and all went very smoothly. Additionally, one of my main gripes about a lot of the main companies is that they list deceptive prices on their websites, often a figure "based on 8 people sharing" - sometimes even in a place that doesn't have accomodation for 8 people. It really frustrates me whereas SnowTrex simply stated a price and didn't budge from it for the whole of the booking process! Bravo! They were also very quick to reply to any of our queries along the way.
We flew into Grenoble, took Bens bus towards Alp d'Huez and then jumped into a taxi for the last half hour journey. The accomodation itself was absolutely fine but I have to say, Vaujanay itself is not for the party-goer. Aside from what looked like a great swimming pool area, the town had: 1 shop, 3 bars, 2 restaurants, 2 bakeries and 1 pizza shop. Most of the bars/restaurants were closed by 8-9pm with the single exception of Stiefs bar which stayed open a little later. There was very little choice from the shop food-wise so being self catering we really struggled for evening meals. The village literally was dead on a night!
That aside, it was well located for the slopes. On a morning we made our way to the cable car (via esculators that ran between the top and bottom of the village) and were taken straight up onto the slopes of the Alp d'Huez area.
The Alp d'Huez area itself I really enjoyed, though equally it is a bit limited. The main slopes around the town of Alp d'Huez were largely beginner/learner slopes, self contained with their own drag lifts so we mostly avoided these. Outside of this close area, the main runs elsewhere were largely black and red and were good but there wasn't a huge amount of them.
The highest runs atop the glacier itself were closed for part of the week due to high winds.
Close to Alp d'Huez there was a board park which we really enjoyed - it was the first time I'd really been through one and we ended up going back 3 days in a row to play in it.
A further draw for me was the "photo jump" in the board park - a photographer sat taking pictures of people as they went over the jump and they were later available for purchase/download (for an extortionate price) from his shop/website - a few examples are below:
The weather also worked in our favour, at the start of the week there was a lot of fresh deep powder which proved a lot of fun and as the week progressed we got more and more sunshine. During the sunshine days we found that in the afternoon the lower valleys tended to fill up with cloud and boarding through this was like going through soup, you literally only saw the edge of the run 10 feet away and had no chance of making out the shape of the slopes so every little dip or drop had you struggling for balance - eventually we caved in and got the cable car back down to Vaujanay instead of battling through the poor visibility - but the tops of the slopes were still clear, bright and sunny!
For the first time I got to really use my board in anger and at first was concerned that it was too unstable but after a bit of use realised it was simply more manouverable than my old board (which was what I had wanted) and I had a lot of fun on it. My boarding all came back to me very quickly and I progressed my jumping as the week went on and also started other simple manouvers like spinning 360 degrees in the snow - both of these things made me want to practise riding switch a bit more, particularly as I'd like to try 180 jumps next and so need to be able to ride out of them in switch.
All in all it was a very enjoyable holiday, I wouldn't put anybody off going to Vaujanay but you definitely should be aware of the total lack of nightlife and food shops!
