Not black and white

Neither the shot nor my day were black and white, despite appearances. The triangle in the road? I'll get to that.

Last night, after an ill-advised late night telly watching session, Mr B hauled me out of bed as he had somehow lost his wedding ring. A very extensive, if somewhat sleepy, search did not result in success.

The morning arrived a little sooner than would have been nice, but after a hearty breakfast and careful manoeuvring around the metal lump on the driveway that scraped the underside of the car yesterday (that fact may be relevant later, so keep it in mind) we were off slipping and sliding up the mountain. 4 wheel drive was fine to get us up there and I scurried off to buy the eye-wateringly expensive lift passes (another fact to keep front of mind) and find ski school.

This has to be the least well organised ski school anywhere. No indication of where the meeting points were, and when we did find someone to ask it turns out they were scattered all over, but all with the linking theme of being up a long steep hill where the drag lift wasn't open yet. So off I (only able-bodied adult after Mr B jarred his back slipping on some ice) marched - having to trust TallGirl to find her own group as her meeting point was far from CarbBoy's. finally got them both sorted, then realised that not only (in the icy driving snow) did I have no goggles (lost somehow) but also I'd forgotten my hat. Between Mr B and I we had just enough accessories to stave off hypothermia; but a ludicrously long horizontal lift followed by a similarly horizontal green convinced us that this was not our day. Zero visibility is not ideal in a resort you've never visited before, but we managed to stumble to a friendly coffee shop for some hot beverages. Some light shopping (goggles) and back off up the hill to seek the kids. Neither of whom were at their assigned meeting points. I finally found them in wholly different places with their instructors utterly bemused by the number of parents grumpy about having arrangements changed like that.

And so, back to the car and off through the driving snow for an afternoon off on our toasty warm chalet... Until we nearly skidded into a snow plough... So we pulled off the road to put the snow chains on. One icy, blizzardy, frustrating hour later and we finally had them on. Mr B had given up and taken refuge in the car which, from the peculiar colour my fingers had gone was probably the sensible option. The kids were freezing, wet and hungry and very much losing the ski holiday joy and my fingers hurt so much I had to have a little cry, but finally it was all done and we were making non-skiddy progress down the hill.

All good.

Until the battery light came on, the heater started failing, the wipers went on a go-slow and most seriously the steering and brakes failed... So of course we stopped. Hurrah for handbrakes. And now our lucky break of the day: the first car we saw when we got out of the car to flag someone down for help was a police car. And their passenger was a woman who had the local breakdown folk on speed-dial.

Hence the triangle. The breakdown man started the engine from his, but said that he thought it was the alternator, not the battery. So he towed us back to his garage where his wife provided numbers for folk who might help us fix it tomorrow and hire us a car to replace it. Though his garage was luckily in the same village as us, it was still a walk of several kilometres through the blizzard to get home. A big lunch, a log fire and a long Monopoly game has given us a rather pleasant end of the afternoon (and I'm probably not just saying that because it's the first time I've ever won at Monopoly - though Mr B was certainly right to be disapproving of my tactics in bribing the kids with cookies to sell me properties cheaply).

Anyway, tomorrow will probably bring less ski action than we would hope, but hopefully some progress on the car front. And to pick up those threads from earlier, can you break an alternator by smacking the bottom of you car really hard, or is the timing coincidental? And how much will those passes (plus ski hire, plus lessons) end up costing us per day of actual skiing?

Sigh.