Oxleys in Araches, France: Skiing Holidays for the Aged!!

1/ The Medicine Cabinet

I guess the photo says everything! This is what our holiday is reduced to at the moment. There are actually more pills, potions and an inhaler somewhere but I couldn't quite lay my hand on them for the photo. Oh we are heartily sick of ourselves we can tell you!! Graeme has gone back to the doctor for some "warm fuzzy handholding" from the attractive young "Dr Sophie" as he calls her. As I'm a little yellow vegetable myself at the moment he obviously hasn't been getting enough sympathy at home. I'm not sure whether he got much handholding but he did come home with some new cough mixture. I wonder if she said "Vous etes un veritable malade imaginaire. Partez en vacances et amusez-vous!" (I got this line from the Lonely Planet guide book if any of you think that I'm actually getting the hang of french!!).

2/ Graeme's favourite store

So to cheer us up - particularly poor ol' Graeme, we drove down the valley to Sallanches to visit his favourite store. Au Vieux Campeur is a Little Bourke Street/ R&R Sports outdoor shop on steroids! Absolutely everything one would ever need for skiing, hiking, climbing,and camping. And a fantastic map and book room with every imagineable guide book for hiking in the alps and travelling the world. They also have, according to Graeme the BEST catalogue of gear EVER - he's already grabbed a copy and uses it for light bed-time reading! For those of us in the digital age, check out http://www.auvieuxcampeur.fr/catalogues/hiver/

Graeme wanted to take some photos inside the store. But I was nervous! A while back we had taken some photos for a friend of a camera store in Australia and we ended up being chased out of the shopping centre!! I did not wish to provoke another international incident, especially since the security guards looked particularly burly and not that well travelled. They'd probably never heard of NZ! I was concerned that our magic line "Pardon moi! Je vien de la Nouvelle Zelande" may not work and trying to explain why we were taking photos would be next to impossible given our limited French. However Graeme is determined. He vows that the next time he goes to Au Viex Campeur he'll duck behind a display cabinet and secretly snap off some photos with our mobile phone! How Inspector Clouseau!!

After a light omelette for lunch at a local bistro in Sallanches we spent some time wandering around the streets of the town. We have been to Sallanches many times but we are always driving through on the way to Chamonix or it's been dark. We had not appreciated the town's quite spectacular setting. It looks directly at Mont Blanc in the west and is surrounded to the north and south by steep sided mountain ranges. It is far enough back from Mont Blance to really get an appreciation of the size of Western Europe's highest peak. At Chamonix you are too close and the valley is too steeply sided to really to get the mountain into perspective.

Wandering around the shopping district, there appeared to be a serious oversupply of magasin chaussure (shoe shops), we counted 8 within a few blocks. [I know where to go to buy those new fashion boots at the end of winter!!]. The second and third most populous stores were lingerie and pharmacies. Well of course... if you wander around Sallanches in the middle of winter wearing only boots and lingerie, the inevitable consequence will surely be influenza!!

But the other store that caught our eye was the local hunting shop. What first attracted us was the incredible collection of knives. Actually come to think of it, almost every store we've seen so far in our little district [except perhaps the lingerie and pharmacy] sell knives. Why? We don't know? Surely there's been a massive decline in their sales now that you can no longer take such weaponry on commercial flights. So that leaves the domestic & European tourist. And what do they do with them? And how many knives to do you need? Seems to me that my fears about the burly security guards at Au Vieux Campeur may have been well founded.

But lastly we came upon the "piece de resistance" - a real life modern blow dart gun. What the?????