Organising Groups

Here are some rules to consider when trying to organise group trips:

1. If you offer people a choice, you will never come to any kind of agreement.
2. Assuming its too late not to offer a choice, prepare for a huge headache as you try to please everyone and accommodate their obscure requirements.

The result of offering people a choice on my last trip is that it ended up costing more than it needed to, but because I am a badass I've managed to arrange flights and accommodation such that we will get 8 days on the slopes and not have the pain of a Eurostar trip.

We'll be returning to Sauze d'Oulx where we will hopefully have a little more snow than last year.

It should be a good trip, and will be the last of my long holidays until Christmas...

I'll write more later, and the gossip will be a lot more juicy if things go well!

Meanwhile here's a photo of an awesome sunset :)

Happy New Year!

I've done a fair bit of driving the last couple of weeks (about 1400km). Here's a list of lessons learnt, mostly for your amusement...

1. It doesn't matter how early you leave, you are not driving fast enough to get to the airport on time if there's a car keeping up with you.
2. The collision damage excess waiver on an Audi A4 Avant is 300€, and is a waste of money.
3. Hire car companies will remove the navigation CD from a navigation equipped car just so they can charge you to rent a navigation off them.
4. It costs the same amount to rent snow chains for a week as it does to buy them from a random motorway service station.
5. Snow chains are recommended in certain circumstances if driving to a ski resort on all-season tyres, however with a bit of forethought (usually spurred on by hindsight) they aren't necessary. In fact I'd go as far as saying people are mad going on about having to get winter tyres and being stuck in the snow.
6. The highest rated navigation software on the iTunes store has no concept of mountain passes being closed in the winter and turned into skiing pistes.
7. Neither does the Garmin navigation system my friend brought along.
8. At 39€ the Frejus tunnel is pretty expensive.
9. Whilst the French will build scary roads that follow the curvature of the mountains, the Italians just build viaducts and dig tunnels resulting in a straight motorway that goes through everything in its path.
10. Italians are mad drivers, especially on the motorway.
11. An Audi A4 loaded with 5 passengers and their luggage handles like a boat and steers only slightly better than the Titanic.
12. The cruise control on Audis is really confusing.
13. The Audi A4 is rubbish and I am soooo glad I bought a BMW instead of an A5 convertible.
14. Although the Audi A4 is crap, it does have a much smoother ride and lighter steering than my BMW, which I only really noticed upon my return to London.
15. Watch out for speed cameras in France, especially when you reset your navigation to default settings in a futile attempt to get it to direct you through the Frejus tunnel instead of over a ski piste. Twice.
16. There is an admin fee for changing your flight on easyjet.
17. If you purchased speedy boarding, you lose it when your flight is changed, and you only find out when you're at the front of the speedy boarding queue and the guy has a go at you for not having speedy boarding.
18. Don't forget you bought speedy boarding when arriving at the airport and queuing with the plebs.
19. There is a bit of road between Turin and Milan where you're driving pretty fast and a train passes you as if you're standing still.
20. Don't go shopping with girls in Milan during the sales.
21. It costs £15 per day extra when you're late for picking up your car from Gatwick airport valet parking.
22. Don't forget the mess you made at home in your rush to pack for your ski trip at the last minute.
23. Although O2 text you telling you that for £1.99 per day you can use your phone abroad as you would at home, the next day they will text you a warning telling you that yesterday you used 70MB and your limit was 25MB and if you do it again they will put you back on the standard tariff. This is more annoying than not having data at all.
24. There is absolutely nothing to do at Milan Malpensa Terminal 1 when waiting 8 hours for a delayed flight from Moscow to arrive, apart from marvel at the variety of taxis waiting at the taxi rank outside. Everything from a Dacia Duster to a Citroen C6 to a BMW 1-series.
25. The French don't know how to make coffee, especially in fancy looking motorway service stops.
26. The Italians do know how to make coffee, even in really dodgy looking motorway service stops.
27. The flat fare from anywhere in Milan to Malpensa airport is 90 euros. Whilst this may seem excessive, it is a 45-60 minute drive, depending on traffic conditions.
28. The closest petrol station to Malpensa is a dodgy and super expensive automated place that has a machine which accepts only cash pre-payment for fuel. It's still cheaper than returning the car without a full tank.
29. The GPS on the iPhone is not fast or accurate enough to give good driving directions in complicated junctions, due to the 2 second sampling interval. Only a fool forgets the two second rule!
30. The french for breathalyser is ethylotest. Don't forget that from next spring if you're not carrying a reusable one (or two disposable ones) while driving in France you can get an on the spot fine.

This New Years Eve was a bazillion times better than last year, and 2012 was really awesome for me. Let's hope 2013 is even better. It's got off to a fabulous start anyway :)

Indiana Backpain and the Fail of Burrito...

I broke my back in 2007, in a snowboarding accident. I might have mentioned it before while ranting about Italy.

In any case, this means that despite the regular exercise, every once in a while my back decides enough is enough and refuses to cooperate.

Friday was one of those days, so not the greatest start to my weekend by any account.

It was the first time for a while, and I'd been feeling the tell tale signs that it was coming for a few weeks (those signs being a general weak feeling and knowing that if I lift something heavy it will give way immediately). I was having difficulty walking, and this time the pain was in a slightly different place to where it was before. I blame the cycling for this, but am as yet undecided on whether this is good or bad. In any case, it meant I couldn't really go to work as walking was quite painful.

Now... back in university I did a unit in business management, and we learnt about this thing called a SWOT analysis. SWOT is Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. The idea is to summarise the SWOT of a company and identify ways to turn threats into strengths and weaknesses into opportunities. I wrote one about BMW suggesting they buy Rolls Royce as a premium brand since they already had a joint venture with them making plane engines, and a few years later they did just that. But I digress.

Back to err... my back. So, I decided to turn my weakness into an opportunity, by going downstairs to try the new local burrito supplier, Burro Burrito.

Sadly, this was an epic fail.

Some of you (ok maybe one of you) will have probably seen my previous placing for Burro Burrito fairly low on the list, ranked as such by a member of the New York chapter of the International Burrito Organisation. I can confirm that Burro Burrito is indeed correctly placed near the bottom of the list.

As per my review on Qype, for some reason they squirt some kind of concentrated lime juice into the rice. I suspect that this is in fact, lime fresh Flash floor cleaner. That's problem number 1. Problem number 2 is that although the meat looks like it's going to taste great... it doesn't. In fact it doesn't really taste of anything. I used to have a Staedtler pencil eraser at school that was more flavoursome. I had to continually squirt the Cholula chili sauce into it just to eat it, and I soon gave up. So my local Burrito supplier is an epic fail. Burrito Fail VII in fact. Damn shame.

To be continued...

Italy hates me

I have a bad history with Italy. It started the first time I ever visited, when I accidentally walked down the wrong side of a mountain and had to find my way to the other side. I accept full responsibility for this, but Italy has punished me severely over the years for this mistake.
The next time I visited Italy, I spent 3 days trying to get the button-lift of doom across the border on my snowboard. I triumphantly made it without falling off and that very morning I had a nasty fall, which resulted in a bone bruise. What is a bone bruise, you may wonder? Well it's like when tempered safety glass shatters. It keeps its shape but is full of cracks. It's as painful as a broken ankle, but takes years to heal, and still hurts to this day.

You'd have thought I'd have learnt that Italy is best avoided by now, but I returned there once again a few years later for more punishment. I should have been suspicious when the customs dog decided it liked the smell of my ski bag. They held me at the airport for at least an hour while they opened everything in my packed bags and checked it for drugs, constantly asking if I'm sure I don't take drugs. Of course I don't take drugs, and if I wanted to smuggle them into Italy there are far easier ways (like by car, where there are no borders to cross, or by snowboard on the button lift of doom). Anyway, they finally let me go and I proceeded to my snowboarding holiday. A few days in, I said to my accompanying friends while navigating the Sella Ronda, that it's not really a holiday for me unless I have an adventure. 2 hours later I fell off the side of the piste and broke my back. I had to go to hospital, be flown home on a stretcher and wear a back brace for 2 months, and had 10 weeks away from work. It was quite painful, and I still have back pains from time to time as well as a twist in my hip.

Maybe I should have learnt my lesson at this point too, but no. I had to go to Rome for my birthday. No sooner had I arrived than I contracted some kind of evil Italian stomach bug. As soon as I ate or drank anything, within 5 minutes I had to run to the nearest toilet and what followed was some kind of nuclear reaction in my digestive tract. This would not have been so much of a problem were it not for the fact that no men's toilet in Rome is equipped with a toilet seat or toilet paper. I don't think I need to go into any more detail. Just as I started to feel better after 5 days, I went for a swim in the sea, and contracted an ear infection which upon my return to London, knocked me out for about 2 weeks. Great.

I really had learnt my lesson by this point. No more trips to Italy planned any time soon... but I still like Pizza and Pasta, and Ferraris. So I bought an Alfa Romeo. This lasted a short time but unfortunately I lent it to a friend and the engine blew up, and I had to scrap the car.
So at this point Italy had tried to destroy my limbs, my back, it had tried to destroy me from the inside out via my stomach, and it had tried to make my head explode. Now it was trying to destroy me financially.

But I still didn't give up. Following a trouble-free (ok, the only trouble was a train problem that forced us to take a taxi instead) week of skiing with a lovely Italian friend of mine, I decided I was ready to reconcile with Italy. As a result I am the proud owner of a Ducati Monster motorcycle. I really like this bike. It's brand new and until recently, was rather shiny. I was wary that Italy may return to haunt me but all was going well until day before yesterday, when in conjunction with a patch of sand in the road, I slipped over and fell. So now my shiny new Ducati which hasn't even been in for its first service yet is rather broken. I priced up original replacement parts for the bike and the total cost comes to around half the price of the bike, which is odd considering they are just ancillary components that are broken. Oh, and the first time I took it to the car wash they sprayed acid all over it, leaving nasty permanent marks all over the aluminium

So now begins my Monster customisation project. It's going to be cheaper for me to buy cool aftermarket bits than it is to buy original Ducati, and it will end up looking loads better.

After that I think I'll part exchange it for a BMW... The only thing the Germans ever did to me was break my watch, and they already repaired that for free.