burnsybhoy: Aye, right – so it’s no!

Obvious answer is the Tarentaise area – Sainte Foy, Les Arcs, Tignes, etc. We’re based there (other bike holiday companies do exist :wink:) – The White Room – French Alps MTB Holidays

Back to £1 = €1.14 today. Best since last autumn.

Unfortunately, we were forced to move a substantial sum last week and got 1.03… still, we did move the minimum possible and saved the rest so hopefully we can make up for it!

Funkydunc: How many pro snowboarders do you think wear helmets? I can think of two (and one of them has only just started after one of the longest careers in snowboarding).

It’s actually one of the more common reasons not to wear a helmet – they’re not cool, ‘cos the pros don’t wear them.

That’ll be Trail Addiction then. MOSTLY downhill… :wink:

Big fat 0 here.

Roof over head: -1
Enough to Eat: -1
Clothes on back: -1
Warm and comfortable: -1
Healthy (apart form mild ear infection): -1
Happy in career/job/work: -3
Have positive, happy relationships with others: -2
Not living in constant threat of war, disease, famine, etc: -1
Happy with current environment: -2
Enough money to not have to worry about bills and stuff: +3

Live in a gorgeous wee chalet in the Alps, work in a gorgeous big chalet in the Alps. Eat in with guests, so food great, clothed, warm, fittest I’ve ever been, work as a snowboard & bike guide, great marriage & friends, no war, live in a great environment. May have picked the wrong time to start my own business in a luxury field… still bookings going OK so far!

The OP was asking about bands who never surpassed their DEBUT album.. Joshua Tree was the 5th album!

Um, no. He wasn’t. Did you even read the first post? He was talking about bands pumping out pap well past their peak.

As with 40mpg, I always used to twist both feet to the left (i.e. left foot twist out, right foot twist in). This worked fine until I got a full sus. And the shock was in the way. And I went back to those ooohhhbuggernononoaaaarrrggh can’t unclip moments.

+1 for U2. The Joshua Tree was stunning, lots of good stuff (and some pap) before, after? Achtung Baby was decent, not many highlights otherwise.

I’m going to echo Bearback. I’ve got DT5.1’s on my Heckler, which I used for guiding in the Alps last summer. Rode almost every day, with vehicle/chairlift uplift so getting loads of vertical (well over 100,000 vertical metres!). Fast singletrack, rocky/technical singletrack, super-rough DH courses, no problems at all. I do have one minor ding in the rear rim, but that was definitely down to “pilot error” (jumped a square-edge drainage ditch and didn’t quite make it!).

Been running them tubless (with the DT kits). Great. Getting tyres on and off is a weird one. I’ve spent half an hour, breaking tyre levers trying to get a tyre off/back on one day, then had to do the same rim/tyre the following day and got it on/off with fingers alone. I reckon you really have to make sure you’ve got the opposite bead off the rim and into the centre channel.

Woodey – I know what your saying and I can’t speak for all areas. Certainly, I’m aware that the riding around places like Lake Garda is pretty well documented so plenty of good stuff to be found with a bit of research. Round here though, the best you could hope for would be to get the IGN maps out and start following the dotted lines. To my knowledge there isn’t a single guide book, route map, web site or anything else giving a decent description of the biking in the Tarentaise area. Believe me, I’ve looked!

Baldy – we do provide guiding, but it’s up to whether you ride with us or not. Very happy to provide maps, route cards, etc.

Curious (genuinely) as to why you don’t want a guide though? Most of the best riding is un-marked (even in the big resorts in the Alps) and having a guide makes your life soooo much easier. Otherwise, you’ll spend half your trip pushing back up singletrack that looked promising but ended up at a cliff or in impenetrable foliage. I know, I’ve been there so you don’t have to!

Alps Mountain Bike Holidays – The White Room

As SammyC says, a grab can help stabilise things. Best one to try is an Indy – back hand grabbing the toe edge between the bindings. Never, ever grab Tindy. :evil:

Usual fault – as with most snowboarding problems – is too much weight on the back fault, causing you to “loop out” with the board flying through underneath you and a landing on the derriere. You should be centred over the board at take-off. Actually being centred will probably feel like you’re WAAAAAAYYYYYYY over the front as you ride up the kicker.

Hard to say more than that without seeing you ride.

Now that I think about it, when I had 2 best men, my brother stepped up to do his speech and said:

“Since there’s 2 best men, we’ve split up the duties 50/50. Since I organised the stag do…. over to you…”

Best mate promptly shat himself. Not literally, but it was probably close.

Delete your temporary internet files. If you’ve never done this before, there will be about 10,000,000,000,000 Gb of them, which slows your machine down no end.

Then go to http://www.pcpitstop.com and run their free tests – results come back with a bunch of easy-to-follow advice on speeding up your PC.

Gary_C – sounds about right, even less to just drive to Bourg Saint Maurice (Peisey-Nancroix is up a pretty long, windy road from the valley).

Alps, definitely Alps. :wink:

Round Les Arcs/Tarentaise area (where we are) you’ll get as much use out of an all-rounder as from a big DH bike. Les Arcs itself only has one DH track, most of the riding is natural(ish) singletrack. Over here in Sainte Foy, it’s all about natural trails. Tignes has a bunch of DH tracks. I ride a Heckler, perfect for round here. The whole area is all about long, flowing, singletrack descents, rather than big, bumpy DH tracks like Morzine/Les Gets.

Bike Holidays in the Tarentaise

I had two best mine at mine. Just felt it seemed wrong to have to pick between my brother and my best mate. Worked really well, no probs at all. Mrs had 2 bridesmaids so seemed fair to me anyway!

Sounds random, but coat them in parmesan cheese and pan-fry them. Great, but cleaning the pan afterwards is a pain…

Not sure it would have helped in this situation mind you…

Because if you carry everything including the kitchen sink, you would never be off the hill before last orders, certainly not practical when doing technical routes, there is way to much hardware to carry as it is. I am speeking as someone who in a pastlife spent ten yrs living in the area obssesing over icy things.

Wearing a transceiver is hardly taking the kitchen sink along. There’s absolutely no penalty to using one (other than the cost, but even that’s a lot less than a couple of ropes and a few ice screws…)

Changing tack slightly (since it’s pointless discussing the actual risk with people who clearly know nothing about snow/avalanches). One thing that does p*ss me off is that climbers (particularly Scottish winter climbers) consistently reject carrying avalanche safety equivalent, such as the transceiver, shovel & probe which are de rigeur for off-piste skiers/boarders. Never figured out why.

Go to the IMBA website, some good stuff on there.

The website warned: “Off-piste and back-country skiing and travel should only be carried out by experienced persons able to evaluate avalanche hazard.”

That’s a bit sensationalist – it should apply to all travel, at any time, on snow-covered terrain.

As others have said, I wouldn’t think twice about going out in “Considerable” avalanche risk conditions. In fact, “Considerable” is pretty much the normal state of the hills for most of the winter.

Typically out here (French Alps) we can expect the risk to be 4 (“High”) for 1-2 days following a heavy snowfall (or moderate snowfall+wind), then 3 for a week or so, then down to 2 if we haven’t had any more snow by that time. If you don’t go off-piste skiing/boarding in level 3 conditions, you’ll never go (and you’ll certainly never get fresh tracks!).

I live in Sainte Foy, near Les Arcs. My wife and I run a chalet – snowboard/ski holidays in the winter, bike holidays in the summer. It’s not a bad life… :D Mountain Bike Holidays Sainte Foy / Les Arcs

willy – I’m from Helensburgh originally, moved around, was back in Glasgow for 3 years, but now live in the Alps!

Don’t know what WTF is on about. The trails are very well surfaced (maybe too well!) so they’re never wet/muddy. The loop is pretty short (6km I think?) but has some fun sections on it. Great place to take beginners, there’s only one feature on the trail (The Kelpie’s Staircase on the Eas Dubh section) that’s likely to prove a show-stopper. The final “bike park” section (lots of easy doubles) is great.

Used to go there regularly for a lazy Sunday-afternoon ride or a night-ride.

boriselbrus: Surely you can challenge that?

Got done once in 13 years of driving back home. That was for 41 in a 30 on a 3-lane road at 2am without another car in sight! My fault all the same, knew there was a camera and was driving at 30, but lost concentration and the speed crept up.

But out here in France, it’s mental. Wife and I have been done 3 times between us in 6 months since we got a vehicle on French plates. Wife got done for 131kph on the motorway! (Limit=130kph!). I got done a few weeks ago for 120kph on the motorway. Limit went down from 130 to 110 for a tunnel, I very carefully drove at 110 all the way through. Put my foot down as I left the tunnel. Flash, flash, 130 sign 100m further on! Camera was on the central reservation with it’s back up against the rock wall separating the two tunnels. Impossible to see it.

Do it however you want it mate. I will say though that mrsstevo and I had a huge wedding (not expensive, just lots of people!) and it was, without doubt, the best day of my life. Everyone I knew was there and we felt like superstars for the day.

You (hopefully!) only do it once so you might as well do it in style!

nasher:

It’s a 1.9, but there are (at least) two different versions. Depending on how old it is, you’ll find 80bhp, 105bhp and 115bhp. Ours is 105 and seems to cope OK. Never any problems at all on road, occasionally struggles a bit on forest roads, but that’s often down to wet/loose surfaces. Test-drove a 115bhp version at one point and it definitely had plenty of grunt.

Only annoying thing I find is that the power band is very narrow. Will crawl/stall much below 2000revs and the rev-limiter kicks-in at 3000revs. That really makes the decision to switch from 1st to 2nd on a tricky hill a make or break one!

Which Burtech trailer are you guys using? Braked/unbraked? Did you get them to modify it for “downhill bikes”? Happy with it? Need to get one bought for the summer!

Takes 6 people + 6 bikes, no problem (rear row of seats folded). For next summer, will have a towbar fitted so we can use a bike trailer and get 9 people + 9 bikes.

Great to drive too, other than the annoying narrow power band.

Cost us 14k euros (back before the £ went to sh*t, fortunately!). Never bothered to figure out exact fuel consumption, but does Calais to the Alps on one tank!

Yo Flatback!

Thanks a lot for that! That was indeed the problem so we’re now back to clean clothes (not to mention sheets and towels for the guests!).

If you ever fancy a cheap MTB (or winter) holiday, give us a shout! (Deduct your call-out fee!) – Mountain Bike Holidays in Sainte Foy / Les Arcs

Turnover is everything you receive, without deductions.

Eh? Can’t you just use ITunes? Or just access the Ipod as an external drive and drag/drop all the music?

Used them on my Hayes 9’s all summer (in the Alps!). Excellent, very happy with them. As good as Hayes originals, and that’s saying something.

Just to piggyback on this since there seem to be experts around. The machine in the chalet (a Fagor) is very sick. The whole drum assembly is way out of kilter with the result that the moving parts rub on the casing (making a horrendous noise). Guessing the suspension is humped (whole thing is sitting too low). Are the suspension units repairable or is it new machine time? (since I’m guessing getting hold of replacements is going to be impossible/expensive).

Hey, it’s a washing machine conversation, but I’ve just brought it round to upgrading suspension, too much sag, etc., etc….

Irrelevant qualifications:

MEng (Mechanical Engineering with Aeronautics)

Relevant qualifications:

SMBLA
ML
BASI 1

Salary: My contract (which I had to write and pass to the lift pass office to qualify for a cheap pass) says I earn 1euro per month. It’s actually less than that.

With a bit of luck, that might be worth about £20k a year the way things are going…

The price of your biking holiday to the Alps doesn’t change at all.

The price of the post-ride slap-up meal and copious quantities of beer does though.

Nope, any decent holiday company :wink: should include those!