Another Long Day on the Piste: A Season in the French Alps

Writer, adventurer, ex-teacher, and veteran of numerous travel catastrophes, Will Randall has fallen off donkeys in Spain and out of canoes in the Solomon Islands, but none of this has prepared him for a season as a ski-bum with a posse of raucous, hard-drinking ex-students. In the charming Alpine backwater of Mont St. Bernard, Will's adventures start badly when he spends his first night in a freezing garage under a pile of unwashed socks. Dismally unfashionable and hopeless at skiing, he realizes he must compete for the attention of the female population with goatee-wearing, lip-studded dudes 15 years his junior. He attempts a stint as a chalet girl for a lodge full of American bankers, which ends in disaster. But when a Russian oligarch—and hair-raising entourage—arrives in the resort and selects Will to tutor his son, rejection and public humiliation could turn out to be the least of Will's worries. His adventures both on the slopes and in the strange, romantic mountain commmunity are beautifully and wittily documented and will win him yet more fans as a most entertaining and warm-hearted travel writer.