Making life a holiday with interesting vacation and adventure ideas.

Rail Europe's popular Eurostar Ski Train has kicked off another season. Tickets for departures between December 14 and January 15, 2009, are already on sale and tickets for the period from February 9 to March 6, 2009, go on sale tomorrow.

The Eurostar Ski Train runs between England's London St Pancras to Bourg Saint-Maurice in the French Alps and the new high-speed rail links mean that Alpine hubs such as Grenoble are a mere six hours from London.

Labels: Alps, France, ski train, skiing, snowboarding

The Red Bull X-Alps, literally takes off on July 23, 2007, as 30 participants embark on an 850 km adventure race across the Alps, from Krippenstein in the Austrian Dachstein range, to Monaco. Arguably one of the world's toughest adventure races, competitors will paraglide, run and climb for 12 to 20 days, taking as little as three to four hours sleep per day; there are four check points on the course, Marmolada in Italy, Eiger in Switzerland, then Mont Blanc and Mont Gros in France.

Live Tracking technology on the Red Bull X-Alps web site will enable the exact location of the competitors to be monitored throughout the race.

There are many paragliding holidays in our searchable database of activity holidays and you may also find our article on Paragliding Vacations interesting.

Labels: 2007, adventure racing, Alps, Red Bull X-Alps

At last, the Alpine ski resorts are now covered in snow. Heavy snow has been falling falling across Europe with snow as low as 800 metres or 2,600ft.

Here are links to snow reports provided by ultimate-ski.com for some popular European ski resorts:

Chamonix Mont-Blanc, France
Les Arcs, France
Verbier/Val de Bagnes, Switzerland
Mayrhofen, Austria
Monterosa, Italy

But beware, heavy snowfall does not come without danger, watch out for avalanche alerts.

Labels: Alps, European, ski, snow reports, snowboard