Image via WikipediaBig night out, this one. Sunday saw our last guests being escorted to Geneva and dispatched homeward-bound. About 2/3 of the resorts are still operational for one more week, but Chamonix has officially shut up shop.

So what do you do when the resort closes, all the guests have gone and you have around 30-40 staff with nothing to do, at the same time, for the first night in almost 5 months?

You fire up the barbie, put the two Aussies in charge of it, and get monumentally wrecked. Of course. My beer count for the night was as follows:

• 1 bottle Brown Ale
• 1 bottle raspberry beer
• 1 shot apple vodka
• 6-7 stubbies of beer
• 1 stubbie cider
• 2-3 classes of very potent punch
• 3 vodka jellies
• 1 pint cider
• 1 Jager-bomb
• 1 bottle Carlsberg (or something – I can’t remember)
• 1 bottle Desperados

I may have been a little tiddly and somewhat late for work the next morning. As you can hopefully see from the attached picture, the view past the barbecue was phenomenal. The food wasn’t half bad either. Proper sausages, great chicken legs, steak, burger, corn…

All this was followed by a lengthy “Oscars” ceremony filled with awards such as “Most improved snowboarder”, “Most tardy hotel worker”, “Biggest slapper” (I was most upset not to even receive a nomination) and so on. Pete and the gang did a great job of putting it together. Although I did notice they want onto drinking shots of Coke about halfway through. Lightweights.

If memory serves, the rest of the night involved Bar D’up (where we were kindly supplied with free Jager-bombs), La Cantina and La Terrace. I’m not sure what time I staggered home but I had been awake for something approaching 24 hours by that stage so I think my little lie in the next morning can be excused.