Goodbye Sestriere Tour

Our last day of skiing in Sestriere was a tour. We had hoped to make our way over the border to Montgenevre, a French resort with great snow and take advantage of the free day of skiing attached to our pass. However it was not to be especially with the limited snow cover, we couldn't even do the long run from the top of Colle Bercia in Claviere which was halfway to Montegenvre. Instead we skied the Women's Olympic downhill course in Sansicario!

Andy and Ella decided to time themselves on their 2nd run although only on the lower half of the course. They managed 3 minutes for 1.5km (the women's gold medalist took 1min50sec from the top to complete 3km). Meanwhile Katy and I headed back up to the top of Mt Fraiteve for an easier run meeting up with the others at the bottom of the J bar. The chairlifts were busier than they had been for the past week. We have all learnt how to keep our spot amongst this chaos of blatant pushing in to get on to the chair the fastest.

From there we hightailed it to a new lunch spot midway between Mt Fraiteve and Col Basset. Under duress, the girls continued on Andy's planned tour which took us to the western edge of the Sauze D'Oulx area. We rode an extremely long chair over the spruce and larch trees to the top of Mt Moncrons. From there the piste was lovely to begin with before a steep narrow icy and torn up piste appeared. I had my first slow motion roll over stack with everyone watching from the bottom! Once recovered from that we made our way to the J bar - another long, steep in parts and bumpy one but we all made it to the top together unlike a few skiers and snowboarders who had fallen off!

A long gentle road took us to another new (for us) chairlift. From here we cruised back past our lunch spot to the chairlift which would get us back to the top. We enjoyed our final gondola ride to be deposited into another chaotic queue with us all getting on together for our final chairlift. It was an easy ski back to the bottom and short walk home. A great day out and awesome tour to conclude our Sestriere experience.