Day 100: Skating on empty ice

About 20 minutes from us there's a little 'ski' village called Les Paccots – I don't think there's a lot of skiing going on there at the moment, given how warm it has been and how little snow has fallen. However, what they do have is a huge covered ice-skating rink, and today we took the girls up there for a bit of a skate. When we first arrived, it was lesson time, so we went back to the nearby town of Chatel-St-Denis to do some shopping.

Back at the rink, the girls got their skates and headed out onto the ice – all by themselves. (It was about 0°C, so we just plonked the refrigerated shopping on a bench.) Unusually for Switzerland, where pretty much everything is expensive, the skating was cheap: four francs for the skate hire and four francs to go on the ice – for as long as you liked. And as it was a school day, there wasn't a single other person on the rink when the girls started.

Kate and I weren't really properly dressed for sitting around in the literally freezing cold, so we eventually fled to the little cafe/restaurant next door, where we were reminded that in Switzerland, pretty much everything is expensive – our two coffees came to more than eight francs. But they had a lovely wood-burning stove and wi fi, so we didn't mind so much.

Eventually, the girls were joined on the ice by a group of schoolkids about Sarah's age (including one little boy who was such a phenomenally good skater that he was simply mesmerising to watch – when the children were racing across the rink, he skated backwards, fooling about, and still won easily). They weren't so keen on company, so finally, having been on the ice for about two hours, they agreed that it was time to go.