Thursday, February 07, 2008

Snowy Mountain Sports

When we visited Casterino the other day, we saw a lot of paragliders [parapente in french] .

I don't think I can ever see me doing any paragliding - I am too freaked out by heights.

I expect there is a tremendous feeling of being at one with the birds and the views must be unbelievable -but the thought of potentially smashing into the ground [or trees] at the end puts me off.

Having said that, I didn't see any bad landings so maybe its not as dangerous as I fear.

This was the landing target -it doesn't look to me like it would be very visible from the air, though most managed to land close.

I saw two little kids triumphantly carrying off some small blue flags, so the target must have become progressively more difficult to see as the afternoon went on.



A few paragliders landed in the middle of the mountain bike racers, and the billowing parachute was an awkward obstacle to cycle round.



The mountainbikers were taking part in a 4hour moutainbike relay race over snow -La 4ème édition des 4 Heures VTT sur neige.

The two-person teams had to cycle a 6km route as many times as possible in 4hours in relay. The snow was pretty thick and visibility poor so it must have been hard going.

A pile of bright red snowshoes just begged to be photographed.

A very sleek black skidoo was a more hightech approach to speeding across the snow-they make a lot of noise and have other drawbacks but they do look like they would be fun. I can't drive and I am pathetic at steering virtual machines in computer games so I'd have to give the skidoo a miss too.

We saw a dog sled pulled by some beautiful huskies -it was possible to reserve rides on the dog sled in advance, I think the price was around 35 euros per person so it would have been a bit much since there were 4 of us.

I would have liked to have taken a ride on the sledge, though, maybe another time.

I have some really lovely photos of the dogs themselves which I will post tomorrow.

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