Mrs Mugsy’s dad has been. They spent about 2 days there!
Mini mugsy loves the video they bought of the place.

oops already posted that ages ago on page 34 with asome others too.

Mrs Mugsy and I after my first La Marmotte in 2008.

Not really got any close up shots of me that are newer as am working away from home.

Le Chalet du Lac
is owned by a friend of mine. Tim Hall. Tell him Dan Heywood sent you the link. Might be a bit small for your group though.

Cheers

You need to watch that.

A similar storm and a similar tent on a similar trip ended up in Mini Mugsy. :D

Good for you. Scotland in Winter is one of many great experiences that makes one glad to have a life and resolve not to waste it.

Where is the heat coming from to form condensation? i.e. surely for condensation to form there must be a significant heat difference between outside and inside.

I have a garage in a block of 3 with a corrguated fibrous cement roof, single skin walls, old workshop style roller door that slides to the side rather than an up and over and never had any condenstaion issues. There’s electricity in it, but nothing putting out any heat so it is roughly the same temp as outside.

BigDave,

Why have you parked your bike outside the house we own in Sheffield?

Or at least it’s an exact copy of our garage entrance, in style, colour, and detail, right down to the drain.Tarmac and walls in a better condition than ours.

Caused me to stop and look closer for 30 seconds or so!

Also renting in France is a lot different. The tenant has a lot more responsibility usually such as maintaining the property, getting boilers serviced etc. BUT they have a freer reign reagridng decorating… AND they are well protected in terms of their rights and are eligible for normally about 2 years notice, and I think, legally are given first dibs on buying the property if it gets put up for sale.

In short: nothing like the UK.

Do Hewitt do one with the S+S couplings? Rourke’s did a steel road frame with them. I’m sure someone would knock you up a tourer with the couplings for a price.

Had a nice days skitouring with Mrs Mugsy from the Col du Lauteret last week. Managed to ski from the car. Well ok we had to cross the road first.

Engineering Geologist

Was on, mostly mind numbing, UK based projects, but the last year and a half I’ve been working overseas in the mining and oil pipeline sectors. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s REALLY great. Sometime it’s bad. Sometimes it’s REALLY bad.

Since moving to France 3 years ago I’ve gone freelance, so I’m either charging peanuts and working from home (easy life) or charging a realistic figure (once you include the extra work Mrs Mugsy has to do looking after mini and micro mugsy)and working overseas.

Happily though the money I’ve earnt in the last year is the stuff of dreams when I was salaried. I have to keep pinching myself. Saving like crazy for the house we’re buying in March. Not sure how long it will last though. When the kids are both at school and we’ve achieved some financial goals I plan to train as an ‘Accompagnateur Montagne’ (International Mountain Leader and take people walking and snow shoeing in less Anglicised parts of the alps.

MrsMugsy – Member
mugsys_m8 can’t think of anything he does…. well he pretends to be his stuffed monkey (which he keeps in his undy drawer) and talks from the stuffed monkey’s point of view.

I’ve threatened if with ‘oxfam’ or ‘rags’ but the look of hurt on his face everytime….

Might give you a clue! :oops:

ah Mrs_Mugsy. I’m crying….

What Elephant?

Mrs Mugsy (francaise)does not understand the need to set a time if we invite people for dinner. When in the UK she would specifically go out of her way to not mention a time if inviting.

However she loves the British for their sense of humour and eccentricity, mostly taking the mickey out of themeselves and not taking themselves too seriously.

I love Mrs Mugsy, can’t wait to see her tomorrow after 6 weeks apart as I’ve been working overseas.

loads of places hire touring kit. Mrs Mugsy has hired touring kit; by the train station in Geneva, in Saas Fee, in Chamonix, in a suburb of Chambery, and in a tiny hamlet in the Vercors (well actually the Vercors was me when my boot buckle exploded…). In France most of the suitably located Decathlons hire touring kit. Touring kit hire includes skis, boots, skins, batons, ski crampons and ontop you can hire rescue kit i.e shovel, probe and arva.

However we had to abaondon a trip due to poorly fitting boots that Mrs Mugsy hired. Skied upto the hut, slept, and skied down from the hut… and it was a public holiday so we could not return the kit and ended up paying a fortune for a 3 hour skin and a 1 hour descent…..

Dam, how does one change forum? Not exactly bike related is it…

Can we get back to the feat of amazing human endurance? :-)

We use the vision quest real rides power DVD.
Seems to be fairly good. It seems to do the trick. i.e lots of grunting noises coming from Mrs Mugsy when she is using it and it’s made me be sick before.

I’d go with muffs. Found them to be much better than mx style shields, and 2nd the idea of wrapping the levers in something. Burwins MZ in Islington used to sell neoprene lever covers.

A 125’s electric system in winter using full lights might struggle with running heated grips too…

In the middle of the Southern Ocean on a slightly bare essentials expedition’yacht’ we had a questionable deposit floating up and down the deck for approx 3 days. It clung on to the lee deck through typical Southern Ocean conditions. It would flow up to the bows then get swept back towards the cockpit.

The heads (toilet) on the yacht was never used in the 4 month trip as a) it didn’t work and b) you couldn’t actually get to it. So all toilet related activity was performed over the side. I got called a wuss on one watch because I had a case of the squits and resorted to using a bucket in the cockpit. When performing over the side timing was critical and we almost lost one chap as the fittings on the yacht were circumspect and he was leaning on the handrail when it gave way….

Sounds great. Good on you.

I prefer messing around on smaller bikes and h.ave a citizen Smith MZ250. Which just makes me laugh all the time when riding it.

However, you seem to be clocking up some fairly serious miles for a 125! I rememebr when I was starting to ride, and my Dad (alos a biker) put it in perspective by telling me that my cyclinder size on my 50, was the same size as a bottle of ink! I still think that’s fantastic, to get enough power to propel a human with such a small compression area.

Have fun. Keep on smiling.

Can 2nd the Vercors as a great warm up venue prior to the alps, or on the way to the alps if touring. Also in places like the Vercors you get to ride a route without it being a huge Marmotte esque day rather than easier day rides in the alps which consist of up a col and down the col, unless you can do some car shuttling.

September and October generally can be great weather, i.e warm UK summer. However I have also skied down part of the road on the Galibier in June.

Happy to give any advice as I live 1 hour riding time to the foot of the Vercors and 10km from Grenoble Airport.

Southern Ocean surviving is tough, let alone racing in it.
I did a trip to South Georgia and back (just) in a home made steel ketch. We sailed through a storm which resulted in the lowest ever pressure being recorded on S.G. 36 hour sewing parties. All men on deck etc.

I know what it is to look friends in the face, and without saying anything communicate that “we are closer to death than living”.I kid you not.

One to tell the grandkids about but I still have the nightmares!
Would I do it again? Absolutley.

I’m so overcome by the sense of wellbeing that I have with the world after reading this thread, that I can’t think of any things that I do that would typically produce a ‘off ffs grow up’. However I know that I do do such things.

SPAM

agree with TJ. Our mortgage provider wanted £250 to set it up, then £250 with every change of tenant. This was 3 years ago.

Lived in France for 3 years. I don’t really see myself as an expat, apart from when working away from home, like now in Azerbaijan. We have, IMO a fully french life, Mrs Mugsy is french, but was in UK for 15 years. All our friends here are french apart from an english family who are ‘getting to know you’ level friends, but that’s it. We don’t hang out in ex pat haunts, do the ex pat thing at all really.

Miss the Peak, miss the English taking the mickey out of themselves type easy going humour. Miss night riding (all the french we know who ride can’t see the point), miss the greeness. LOTS of things we don’t miss though: the stress, the contiunual unpsoken one upmanship between even friends etc.

My client is my ex employer in the UK, but I work mostly form home, or overseas.

The start of my downfall was being convinced by Mrs Mugsy to throw all my cd cases. I Put all my cd’s in a wallet. And stopped listening to music juat because it was a pain to search through all the cd’s.

I thought by ripping all my music to mp3 CBR 192kbit/s was the answer to this, but now it has posed more questions and not solved any….

Hi to all the guys out on the road. From Me in Baku, Azerbaiajan until 23rd Dec and then back out beginning of Jan.

I’m interested in this. Ish.
I have all my cd’s as MP3’s and am looking for a mp3 player woth hard disc that I can connect up to the stereo rather than using a computer. I would like a screen and a remote. We don’t have a tv, but reguarly use a projector with a built in DVD player and also accept input from a computer etc.
I’ve seen the Brennan,b ut not sure it does exactly what I want.

People say just use an ipod with a docking station, but to me it doesn’t seem the best way.

I’d like a separates style MP3 player, with screen that I can play via an amp/ receiver.

Not intersedted in the likes of squeezebox etc as that still needs a computer.

hmm just got sn e-mail from my currency house offering euros at 1.16 to the £.

Nice one Binners.
Doesn’t look like the house that we’ve signed a promise to buy contract for though and already put a deposit down to guarantee that we will buy it.

Ok. Purely seflish mode now. I will be needing to convert £ to euros sometime between now and March for a house deposit. I will need about 55k in euros. What’s the best plan? I don’t have all the money yet, but have about 70% of it.

Is my house purchase at risk? I can probably go to a 1:1 exchange rate but If I get less than 1 euro for £1 I am borked.

I do think with £15k you could make some good positive changes (as well as some negative changes: coke and hooker habit?)

With about a 1/4 of that Mrs Mugsy and I chucked in our engineering consultancy jobs in the UK, she took a plane, I took a self drive hired 7.5 tonne truck and moved our life,including 1 1/2 year old son to France. Mrs Mugsy has a similar job in France, and I work freelance for my old company, either from home (near the alps!) or away on international projects. We won. We still think ‘this is to good to be true’. We are in a financial situation which we could never imagine being in the UK. And in a few years time I’m thinking of retraining as a European Mountain Leader, taking people out into the hills.

I like your thinking, and wish you the best.

Things are starting to get done, but the foehn isn’t helping. See
http://www.skitour.fr/

Dan

I had a c15 on a w plate. Bought it for £3k with about 30k miles on it, sold it 3 years later for about £1.5k with 80k odd miles on it. Had to put a new radiator on it, but can’t remember having to do much else to it.

One of the best vehicles I had. Very nostalgic about it, as it was a good stage in my life: met Mrs Mugsy, lots of weekends away winter climbing, climbing, mtbing, adventure racing etc in it etc etc.

Ah yes RD350LC’s. Marking my dad’d elsie’s position in the garage with a pencil and then sneaking out on it at lunchtimes from college. Microns the works. Never had bigger grins on my face!!! And then the “oh yes I’ve seen you’ve been riding my bike” mentioned in passing and nothing said anymore!

Used to love watching them racing at Snetterton, New Era etc.

I have an MZETZ251 on a K plate in pretty good condition. Not been on the road for about 12 years now, sitting in my dad’s garage. I must get it back to france to paly around with.

RINGADINGRINGDINGDINGRING…..

Loving this thread! Shame I don’t have any photos of mine and my dad’d bikes with me here in Azerbaijan.

Does it fit me is the question I’d be asking. Having learnt the hard way with road bikes (not Canyon’s per se)

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up. How about for the subversive fixie groupset?

‘cupboard in my attic’

Is your attic converted into a room? and this cupboard is adjacent to the converted bit but obviously not converted?

Depending on the abve, i’d say depends on where you put the insulation: i.e. between the rafters AND the wall between converted/ non converted vs. bettwen the floor/ ceiling joists.