Planning the Trip to Risoul, France, 2008
The planning for this holiday started a little bit late. Planning to go out in March we started researching disabled ski equipment just after Xmas, much the same as we did the previous year, but the ethos for this holiday was different from the previous year in that we decided to plan the holiday around where we wanted to go rather than going somewhere that we knew was setup for disabled people. This was a bit risky perhaps but budget is always an issue and as a friend of ours had a chalet in Risoul that we could stay in we decided that this was the best option.
So this being the case we started researching to find out what the chair was called that Tudur had used in La Plagne. A quick Google search led us to Tessier. Their website had a lot of useful info on it. We found that they had several different types of ski chair which was a big eye opener for us, from our experience in La Plagne it didn't seem that there was any kind of equipment that someone with Tudur's level of disability could use (more on this later).
The chair that caught our eye was the Kartski. - " The Kartski is intended to people who want to ski in an autonomous way, who can use their arms but who have not enough balance to ski with Uniski or Dualski." - this sounded perfect for Tudur.
So we emailed Tessier to find out if we could rent one for a week. They responded saying that they did not hire them out themselves but there were a few resorts that had a Kartski that may be able to hire them to us. This seemed good but as we had left it a bit late and we had a set week that we were going (French half term no less) no one was able to hire one to us.
We emailed Tessier to let them know that we had no luck and asked them again, in a last ditch attempt, if they could hire one to us. Amazingly they said yes! - but only for 3 days. This was slightly disappointing but was the best we could hope for at this stage - we only had a month left before our holiday.
So all was good until we received an email from Tessier to check that we had a competent skier in our group (the Kartski requires a skier to be attached to it by a cord). This led to an immediate panic - non of our group were skiers at all, but snowboarders, very competant snowboarders but having watched a video of the Kartski in action on the Tessier website it didn't look like the easiest (or safest) thing to be attached to while snowboarding.
We emailed Tessier again to let them know our dilemma. (We only had just over a week to go at this stage). This was the turning point in the whole Tudeski experience. The response from Tessier was that the whole thing seemed very complicated and why didn't we just try the Dualski or Uniski? Their opinion being that someone with Tudur's level of disability would be able to ski by himself with either the Dualski or Uniski - BIG news to us!
So it was agreed that we could have a day of tuition with Tessier and if they felt that Tudur could pick it up and that the rest of us could help him safely on and off lifts then they would hire the Dualski to us so that we could take it back to Risoul with us and unleash Tudur onto the slopes!
Read next story - First Lesson with the Dualski
