This day, almost perfect

Rare elongated stretches of combined time off shone onto us today, with our new aces clients saying "ah no don't worry about driving us today, we'll look after ourselves". W O W. And with that, we made sure to make the absolute most of it. Took a trip over to Vallorcine, which is about as close to Switzerland as our passes will allow us [+ as close to Shania Twain's home- but that ambition "Skiing to Shania" explanation is for another day]. A perfect sun scolding down onto crisp creaky snow, sandwiches + frozen oranges at the top with our Romanians and an afternoon of winding along discovering new paths + pistes, pretty much singing all the way.

An invitation that evening for a freebie dinner in a candle filled y o u r t made itself known to us + we leapt at the opportunity with great excitement- mainly because it started with a flamed torch walk through the winding steep forest. But our scrappy tired feet got there moments too late and attained tardy bewilderment, nevertheless providing us with a great idea : we'll obviously just go walking in the forest without the torches or the guide + make our own way there! And a fine idea it turned out to be, as our peering eyes scrounging for visuals led us through scintillatingly dim paths, once again finding ourselves surrounded by the shear extensiveness of alpine'd nature, slurping on wine + wide eyed with a ferocious feeling of real adventure. The yurt was illuminated so beautifully with flames + fire pits for us to then be welcomed with hot soup that was cooking in a cauldron. Bellowing into our eyes was that sweet nostalgic smell of campfire fumes, glowing in the snow + casting fine wobbling shadows that danced on the disturbed surface of the forever whitened ground. But in retrospect it turns out that was as good as this enchanting extravaganza was going to get, as the dinner unravelled itself we found ourselves turning down course after course of throbbing meat carcasses of varying Savoyan form and politely trying to salvage conversation with a bunch of commercial ski reps who were mainly talking scathingly about the "pikies" who were scrounging + living rent free in their buses dotted around the valley- Dan + I nudging eachother under the table + biting our tongues for the sake of saving the evening in order to bide time before it was polite enough to made our sweet way out into the fine night drowning in moon and star light to talk about how excited we are to live in our bus on the side of a French road.

It feels luxurious to seep up the benefits of rich people's left-overs: ½ drunk bottles of fine wine, used designer soaps, sloppy seconds from dinner, tatted belongings [mainly food or booze] left at the end of their stays alongside occasional blissful use of these multiple million buck chalets to drool at the view in + adopt a very temporary flamboyantly wealthy lifestyle. However, as much immediate satisfaction we are able to derive from these attributes, we yearn for scrappiness, for humbleness, for modesty, for lentils, for growing beards*, for multiple knotted nests in matted hair**, for informalities. For Baked Beans. As predicted, it's so very interesting to live in such a contrasting world to anything we've ever known and also, following suit with our pre-determined predictions, makes us feel more comfortable than ever before with our unobtrusive ambitions to live a happy life in a house made of mud.

*Dan
**Anna