Logo a go go

Here it is, the all singing dancing Mountain Spaces logo. I think in the Flickr upload process the colours may have have altered slightly, something to do with CMKY files and jpegs or some other unintelligible acronym.

A big thank you to Dave who came out to shoot the Chalet last week, it wasn't exactly a holiday and we'd be scuppered without some decent photos for the website, so nice one bruvva.



Website should be around by the end of next week possibly.

Ooooh, arty

After an incredibly boring day off work due to cyclone inbound for downtown Hong Kong (everything shuts, nothing to do, cabin fever) I decided to post some more pedestrian photos of our Alpine adventures.

Cheers for a great week everyone, it was excellent catching up, having quality time with my homies and confusing my inner workings with too much cheese. See you at Christmas for more. By the way, if anyone fancies some festive chilli-wing action, I bought a jar of Zhuangxiang Top Capsicum Extremely Hot sauce. I quote from the label...

"King of hot pepper of Wu Lao Gui's has unique places, openning the bottle lid will have fermented phenomenon in period of time. And only pass the pur king of hot pepper of Zhang rural area who fermented naturally, could only release out the best taste out of the common, strong, overbearingly hot fragrant. Hand over the surface, stir-fry, mix the sauced material on the steamed bun, a sense is first-class".

It looks nasty. Anyone game?







We should have won... we were frickin robbed!!






Le boeuf est dans la vache


Un Grand Coq...


I want one of these if you're stuck for Cristmas present ideas...

Alps Part Deux, Part Two

Here it is-the biking bits after a suitable delay-why oh why do we have to go back to work! Basically we (me-Daryl, Dave, Gavin "Legwood" Edwards and Mike) went to Les Gets, Morzine, Avoriaz, Champery and broke all course records, aired some new undiscovered gaps etc. etc. Day 1-They have now relabelled the "Barel Gap" on the Les Gets 4x to the "Legwood Gap". Day 2- Daryl and Mike raced Sam Hill down the Champery World Cup course-Sammie couldn't cope with the pace and crashed out. Day 3-Dave broke the course record formely held by Chris Kovarik on Pleney in Morzine after some slick overtaking of Finter in the final wooded section.....Anyway back in the real world
Day 1-Straight on the case in a bid to make the most of our 3 days of biking we tried to rediscover all the trails from our foray 2 years ago. Rode Chavannes and rediscovered those legendary braking bumps (not again thanks), then Mont Chery-still steep, then over to Morzine after jumping the fences on the not so official anymore Les Gets-Morzine link!! Then a blast down Pleney, followed by a trip over to Avoriaz and a blast down some new runs through the woods which were very good indeed. Good days riding for all, except for me binning it hard on the road right in front of a car on the way home-smooth!!


Day 2- We took a linear route straight over into Switzerland with the aim of getting to Champery to have a look at the worlds course (and maybe kid oursleves into riding it). Some very good natural trails made a nice change from the man-made stuff, took away from the dissapointment of the lift not running on the worlds course and us missing the top of the other DH track. We then ran down the rocky route right back to Morzine-with a couple of dozen stops in between for Mikes punctures!



Day 3- We used this as a best of day so tried to ride all the favourites and did a pretty good job in-all. Including finding a secret trail running under the super morzine lift which was frankly-savagely steep and rooty-but thankfully dry. This made for some technical and intense riding and Legwood ending up 10 foot down off the side of the trail in what kind only be described as the upside down position-bike atop! Dave and I then ran Pleney again and got some great camera footage and set what we thought was a pretty good time-5 and a bit minutes to the fireroad-I have since found out 4 mins is a v. good time so make of that what you will (we slow!!)

Aston Hill.

Wet, slimey rooty and technical come to mind. Yesterdays ride at Aston Hill was far harder riding than any of the rooted wooded sections that we hit in the Alps. Mostly because of the greasy nature of the roots. However, it was still fun and we had a little sesh on the 4x course, of which the video below is:



More footage than this, but Adam is going to have to wait for me to finish the video to see the best bits!


In total Adam, Neil and Andy came up from down south and I finally managed to Jon out on a working bike. He did admirably considering he was riding his Azonic jump frame!
The confusion over which route is which continues, but DH3 was the best, most flowing route that I ran there, by far.



Car park Enduro based geek out.

Alpes Part Deux!

Quite a week! Leaving Blighty behind and meeting up in a BP station forecourt, Team IBFC headed back out to dish some abuse to the hills of Les Gets and Morzine and if the Swiss thought they'd get away un tarnished, they were wrong!

Steffi and I joined forces with Daryl, Gemma, Gav, Jen (all too briefly) and Expat Mike for a week of sun, walking, riding, beer, BBQs in rain, hot tubs, more beer and an unfeasible amount of punctures!

We were back at Chalet Martinet, not through fierce loyalty, but just because its a cracking place and well priced! After a small recovery sleep and sauna, we set to it on Sunday with a drive to Les Lindarets (Goat Village) and saw the most amazing amount/collection of classic cars, doing a rally tour. Renault Alpines, TR6s, old Porches, a Fiat 500 Arbath, lots of Triumphs and all manner of others. Amazing, Mike nearly exploded. Then it was on and up the hill to a chair lift and a walk to the amazing waterfall for lunch!









Monday was the start of the biking and for this, I will try and get Daryl to post!






Des Cosmiques with Mt Blanc behind, in cloud...

Guinea Pig a go go

Quick test to embed a Google map, might be quite nice to tie one of these in with riding or climbing pics.

Map is the location of the Chalet and lifts, was just seeing what sort of stuff you can include, google maps round that area has terrain as which is quite cool, might see if you can make it a default setting.



View Larger Map

Website and them some

A selection of two new visuals from the second batch the designers sent through. The rest are variations on these two themes, Sqwaaaaaarrr or all round and cuddly.



Our original thought with all round and cuddly was that the colours were too cold and it didn't look 'classy' enough, a rubbish description but we didn't feel it matched a company selling £500 and above holidays, maybe a darker background helps with this.




We also asked for a more angular design so we would have something to compare, I'm now torn as there are aspects of both designs I really like, answers on a postcard!!

Website Visuals

We've got some non functional visuals of the website back from the designer any comments would be more than welcome.



we've got a couple of suggestions to make but I won't mention them as I'd be interested to see what people come up with, colour scheme layout etc. The name is just a type face, it's not our actual logo as that's on another quote. Pictures might not be completely relevant to the headings as we've only given the designers some 'stock' images so the photography will improve.



Clarity, ease of use and standing out with a touch of class are our main objectives. Can't really comment on anything else yet as we haven't written the copy.



General view opinions in a language I understand are welcome as are Gav's suggestions/comments in a geek language I don't. Honest opinions wanted if it's not right we need to change ASAP.