I had a great text from a mate in London this week: “So what are you actually doing in Switzerland when there’s no snow?”.

His understandable points were what do you do (see our previous blog on this classic ski instructor question), how do you make ends meet and isn’t it a bit dull.

And it made me laugh a bit because I got it when I turned on my phone back on after getting off a flight to Geneva which approached along the lake, taking in epic views of the snow on all the peaks over 3000 meters – from the Bernese Oberland across to Mont Blanc.

(The picture above hardly does it justice but click on it and you can zoom into it and pick stuff out).

Best of all though, the Grand Combin (that’s the really big mountain on the other side of the valley from Verbier – you know, the one with the slanty glacier on top) stood out like a sore thumb – fresh snow on the summit and the biggest one for miles around… You can just see it here, next to the wing tip:

And I sat in my seat like a grinning idiot, brimming with excitement and just stupidly happy to be coming back. So when I got that text from Lee it seemed to underline why it’s amazing to be in the mountains at any time of year. It’s an amazing place, in a brilliant (if a bit quirky and cheese-obsessed) corner of the world.

And, to underline this, when I got off the bus to Verbier, the fact that it seemed appropriate that it was the warm up for Swiss National Day – basically yet another reason for the Swiss to have a party, eat cheese and drink white wine.

Which made it somehow more perfect, and is also the reason I’m typing this with what feels like a pair of knitting needles behind my eyes.

So are there better places to live? Yup. Probably. But why on earth would you bother looking for them when you can be here?

…that you see something like this when you are walking the dog…

It turns out it was a Toyota from the Verbier Festival in the stream of the Moulin..! Couple of beers mi’ thinks..! T

Firstly I would like to apologise for not keeping you good, loyal folk in-touch with the goings-on in Verbier.

But there really is no point in keeping you up-to-date on nothing. We lead a tranquil, slow-paced life here in the summer. Really – nothing has been going on for the past week.

So it’s good to see town buzzing again now, it’s also good to have a couple of weeks of solid sunshine. Thats much more like it.

As well as the festival we have a weekly market on every Sunday. The usual deal, pretty much cheese, honey and knick knacks.

But this week there were a few familiar faces with stands; Lucy Dunnet from donut designs had a number of her fab painting on show (see below). Also Jo Chandler from Petit Verbier stall lined the street offering face painting and a play area for the kiddies.

Once we made it up to Ruinette we waked over to the area by the Restaurant La Marmotte. We came across what can only be described as a Val de Bagne version of the Bath and West show. A proper agricultural shindig complete with the fizzy white wine (Fandant) and tonnes of melted cheese (Raclette). Just as were heading off the ‘main event’ started; The cow fight.

Now I thought this happened in Sambrancher or Le Chable at the end of the season. A kind of gladitoral going home event for all the ‘etrangers’ of Verbier. From what I gather this is qualifying. Which is hilarious. Not only that, I have recently found out there are different classes and weights. This perticular event was for 2 year old virgins..! I am not kidding.

Don’t get your hopes up, it’s a slow process, if the process actually starts. A number of the ladies were not keen to fight so were disqualified. Once a fight does commence there is no understanding of the rules. Only one thing can be counted on, one will win and one will lose. How they actually manage to determine this is completely beyond me….

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We were on a mission to find a picnic area for some clients at the Lodge, the brief was to find an area near a lake but not normally accessible. Sounds easy you say. Well in actual fact it’s not as easy as it looks. The first problem is that you have to find some way of getting up high. Not all vehicles can make it due to the rugged road and snow residue.

Thanks to the kind people at Ski Armadillo we managed to borrow their Polaris off-road vehicle called Boris. As we climbed up from Ruinette we came across a pile of snow that stopped our progress completely. It wasn’t a complete waste of time as we trundled round to La Chaux where we found the perfect spot:

We weren’t the only ones enjoying the ride. We decided on the cheap way of walking Laika:

It’s a natural question to ask isn’t it?

You’re talking to someone who’s fundamentally only doing a job for the winter. You’d ask a the bloke who drives a road-gritting lorry the same question. You’d ask the guy at the lift station (if lifties didn’t carry such an air of grumpy unapproachability). And you certainly ask a Ski instructor. Or a reindeer. Or Santa’s elves. Or perhaps our Kato.

So what are we doing?

Well, in an ideal world we’d all be sitting in the sunshine on the T-Bar terrace getting sun-burnt, but in this far from ideal world we all disappear off for a moderately nomadic few months.

So Nicol’s dashing between his building project in Le Chable and work all over the UK, Kent’s off touring round Sweden running the family catering business with Jenny and bringing his winning smile to the world of hotdogs and beef burgers.

Olly (who’s thirty today – wish him a happy birthday if you get chance) is off to New Zealand to teach out there for the Southern Hemisphere winter. Rich and Gina are back painting houses (and Rich is probably skiving off a lot to play golf).

Toby’s manning the office and taking Laika for walks in a rather soggy Verbier, Westy’s cooking in the dungeon beneath T-Bar and I’m in an equally rainy Amsterdam writing ads for Heineken (the research is killing me…).

But despite the fact that summer is only just beginning (well, it’s supposed to be here now but seems a wee bit delayed) our conversation’s already turned to winter 2010/2011, pre-season training, new skis and what colour uniforms we should be wearing.

Maybe if the sun decides to grace us with it’s presence we’ll get the bikes out and try not to wish away summer again. But it’s snowing up top today and you can’t help wonder what the glacier’s looking like in Saas Fee…

It reminds me of a quote by Chris Laidlaw, a Kiwi journalist. He was writing about  Rugby, but I’ll plagiarize it a bit here…

“[Skiing] may have many problems, but the gravest of them is undoubtedly that of the persistence of summer.”

Not long left now though – only four and a half months before TeleVerbier think about starting the lifts at the weekends…

It was good to finally make use of the sunny weather in Verbier. It was eerily quiet this weekend considering it is a bank holiday.

We thought we would celebrate Tom Renshaw from CK Verbier’s departure. Luckily he had tonnes of supplies that had to be eaten including line caught sardines (see pic). Thanks to Jono and Tom for cooking the feast..!

All in all a great night. Good luck Tom in France. See you next season..T