skiing in France

zenith

Hi,

Thinking of popping onto the Rosslare-Cherbourg ferries with a bunch of mates for a road trip/ski-ing holiday next Jan.

No particular thoughts about resorts, durations, etc, but would like to minimize driving, and we're looking for a resort with good night life and good ski-ing, probably soley in France.

Any more experienced hands at this sort of thing got any suggestions to make?

HarryD

I lived in Nice for 5 months, and there's a few resorts close-by.
Isola & Auron are around 1hr - 1.5hrs away..
More over the border in Italy..
All the resorts have good night-life..

Night-life in Nice ain't the best though..

zenith

We've been doing some more work on this, and we're thinking of making a bee-line for La 3 Vallees - we reckon that's the easiest to drive to - anybody got any recommends on (a) villages, or (b) chalets near there?

Culchie

3 Valleys ... in Savoie over near Geneva?

http://www.les3vallees.com/uk/021_stations.html


Good Choice


There's Les Arcs as well in the area

uzami

http://www.worldsnowboardguide.com/

This is a pretty comprehensive guide to the various resorts that comprise the 3 valley's. It is a massive skiing area all interlinked. Plenty of accomodation choices, really depends on how much you want to spend.

I've previously stayed in Meribel and Courcheval, though haven't been back to either in the last 5 years.


In France if I had a choice I would go to Chamonix.

penexpers

Don't think the Rosslare-Cherbourg ferry runs in January anymore?

Anyway all the decent resorts in France are down in the Alps, which from Rosslare would take approx 2 days to drive down to. There's also Andorra, which would take about 2 days to get to too (or maybe slightly longer). Andorra does have the advantage of having a good nightlife. Andorra doesn't have fantastic skiing though. The best resort I've been to in France is probably Morzine/Avoriaz. Plenty of really excellent skiing. Morzine/Avoriaz is part of a ski area called Les Portes Du Soleil which links about 12 resorts in France and Switzerland together. There's something crazy like 650km of runs and you can even ski into Switzerland as an added bonus.

skibum

I agree with penexpers about "Les Portes Du Soleil" you have a huge choice of resorts / runs. A couple of years ago we took the car, we did Dublin - Holyhead, dover-calais, and overnight in Paris to pick up the brother in law and on to Chatel the next morning. When we organised the trip we made sure that there were no school holidays at the same time (both english and french)
so the slopes were pretty empty
On the way back we left at 7.30am got to paris about 1pm, dropped off Giles had a bite to eat and headed for calais and made it back to dublin at around 6am. It was one hell of a drive, and being honest the speed limit's were broken a few times while in france! The brother in law now tells us that they are clamping down on speeders big time with very hefty on the spot fines, so take it easy.

zenith

Aw, nuts:

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from irishferries.com
Our sailings on this route cease on January 2nd and don't recommence until the first week of March. We will still be offering landbridge connections throughout January, but won't have the 2006 fares for most routes until the late Autumn.

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Landbridge it is then.