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Climbing day and pizza.

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Up early on Wednesday for our first family day of climbing at Les Gaillands, the magnificent crag just outside of town.

Mark dropped me and the 17yo off in front of the bakery across from the Aiguille de Midi lift, and I bought six sandwiches and a bunch of pastries and a couple of quiches. (I did a fine job ordering the sandwiches according to the placards that were posted in front of them, but we discovered later that the placards had not been placed in front of the corresponding sandwiches, so we had different ones than we wanted.) For pastries: two petit pains au chocolat, one croix de Savoie (a local specialty), a fat brioche chocolat-orange, and something with nuts on it called a “canadienne” (maybe it had maple? I don’t know, I didn’t get any).
The quiches Lorraines for breakfast between Mark and me, even though the women behind the counter at the bakery will laugh at you if you commit the faux pas of thinking that it is all right to eat a quiche for breakfast. Quiches are lunch food in France as far as I can tell and only weird people and Englishmen would think of having so much protein before noon. You are supposed to have something healthier, I guess, like black coffee and a cigarette.
But I think the little quiches make a marvelous breakfast.
Mark picked us up after stopping at the grocery store for drinks and snacks for the next day’s outing, and we were off — only a ten-minute drive.
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We have been here before. It is a great climbing place for a family, because there are often children there; not French children now, because they just started school, but there was a large passel of British children climbing next to us. There’s a big grassy field with boulders here and there to climb on, and a little lake for fishing, and some caves and interesting old building foundations. Also a little café/concession stand thing that sells drinks, snacks, and crêpes, and public toilets.

Also, the ground by the crag is covered with interesting small rocks. Which is good when you are a three-year-old with a toy dump truck, and your siblings are going to take turns supervising you. My daughter took the first shift, and was promised more climbing than she could stand later in the morning.

Jeff (green shirt) is an American who splits his time between Colorado and Europe. He couldn’t believe it had been three years since our last trip. I think he’s great with our kids, and Mark has been out with him several times. Nothing we will do here at this crag will be very technically difficult, so we don’t really need a mountain guide for this; but we do need another adult who can belay, since somebody has to be watching our younger boys all the time, and Jeff needs to get an idea of how well our older boys can take instruction since they’re going out with him on the mountain the next day. So he spent some time taking them through a few drills which he suggested they could practice at home.

 

Meanwhile, the rest of us put on our harnesses and shoes. Mark prepared to belay the 7yo. He is quite small for his age, so we still have him in a chest harness; flipping upside down is more of a possibility for small ones, and so you want them in a harness with shoulder straps.

After the 7yo came down, Mark belayed me for a quick and easy warmup climb; and then when it was my turn to be lowered, which entails leaning back into the rope and “walking” backwards down the rock, I was surprised to find that it was kind of scary. Surprised only because I have spent enough time in the climbing gym on auto-belay to not find that scary; but it turned out the comfort didn’t transfer very well. I got used to it, though, and found my feet.

The 11yo girl got her chance soon to have some instruction from Jeff and then to start climbing.

Meanwhile the 13yo, looking cool, was to take over the 3yo (still not a difficult job; he was making avalanches by piling small rocks on top of the boulders and pushing them down). The 17yo, a member of the high school climb team at the local gym, earned his keep by belaying the 7yo.

I don’t belay. Most of the time, there’s no need for me to do so. I have learned how (theoretically) but have not practiced enough for it to become second nature. Mark showed me how with his easiest belay device and practiced with me for a couple of hours, and then declared me competent enough to pass the belay exam at the climbing gym, which he said was just a formality because you only had to be good enough to get started and then you could get better by practicing in the gym. I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I went along with him anyway and we got a gym employee to give me the belay test. I failed immediately and humiliatingly, humiliatingly enough that I think Mark was embarrassed on his own behalf.

Anyway, I am not sure that I want to belay my own kids; it seems like the sort of thing that would make me very nervous. I also don’t like very much to have my oldest belay me, although I have, a few times. Oddly enough though, I am completely comfortable with the 17yo belaying the other children.

Which is handy when you are all out at the crag.

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The lit
tler ones did not like the sandwiches, and they did not like the petit pains au chocolat (it is a dark and bitter chocolate, perfect à mon goût but not to theirs), but they did like the croix de Savoie and so they ate it for lunch. Along with some fruit snacks that were left over in the 3yo’s back pack from the supplies I had packed for the plane.

My daughter is fond of tuna subs, so I had made sure to order one sandwich de thon. She was surprised how much she liked it. “The tomato and lettuce are good,” she said. “I don’t like how the hardboiled eggs are sliced instead of chopped up into the tuna, because you get a lot of egg in every bite, but it’s okay. The tuna part tastes amazing.”
I tasted it too and thought about it. “I think there’s more mayonnaise, possibly better mayonnaise, and it’s probably different tuna than you are used to. We might have to try recreating it at home.”
The other sandwiches were proscuitto-and-goat-cheese on ciabatta and ham-and-butter on baguette. Very nice. We also had some lovely green plums, “reines claudes,” a fruit I cannot get enough of when I am in Europe. They are sweet and apricot-sized, and the skin is tender, without the jaw-clenching tartness that you sometimes get with fat purple American plums. They are juicy enough to be flavorful but not juicy enough to drip down your chin or to fall apart into mush as you eat them. The stone is free so you can eat all the lovely pale green flesh in a few bites.
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After lunch everyone had a chance to climb a longer and more interesting route. The 7yo is not frightened at all anymore.
 

The wall had a long smooth section with very few toeholds, good for technical practice; but practically had stairsteps on either side. I really can’t overstate how marvelous the rock is. It is very rugged and steppy, easy to find footholds and handholds almost anywhere you look, with ledges here and there on which grow spiky grasses and tiny tufts of mountain flowers. The rock glitters with mica in places and in other places so iron-red and smooth you wonder if it would attract a magnet. And yet there are smooth sections where you must “step on nothing and trust it will hold you,” as Jeff put it. There are bolts fixed in places to practice lead climbing; in the afternoon, my oldest would get some practice and instruction with those, after I went home with the other four kids for a rest, to let Mark and the 17yo profit from the afternoon with the guide.

Before I left I wanted to get some vigorous exercise, so I asked to be belayed several times on the same route one after another. First Jeff belayed me, and then after a while, Mark took over the belay. I watched from the top as they transferred my rope from one to the other, and Jeff teased me: “You’ll only be off belay for a couple of minutes. I think. I’ve only done this a couple of times.”

I got the 17yo to take some pictures of me climbing. I swear I am better at it than I was three years ago, even if I still kind of look like a dork.

I am not at all happy with what the harness, under load, does to the abdominal material left over from my pregnancies. Good thing it is not a fashion show.
After I went up and down quickly a few times, I felt ready to take the younger kids home. We intended to let the 13yo climb more, but he still suffered pretty terribly from jet lag, and wanted to sleep. So we loaded most of the stuff in the van (as well as the 3yo, who had to be dragged weeping away from his beloved pile of little rocks), and Mark drove us back to the apartment. Then he returned to finish the day out with Jeff and the 17yo.
I snapped this picture of the Bossons glacier from the car. It’s one of my favorite views from town.
We rested all afternoon, until Mark and the 17yo returned, pleased with himself for having had lots of lead climbing practice. And then we all got dressed and headed out for pizza. Our walk took us past the field where the parasailers land and through the town to a little pizza place that we had eaten at before: a sort of a wooden train-car-shaped shack, cash only, with a Neapolitan-style pizza oven inside and a couple of picnic tables outside.
 
I ordered a pizza margherita with black olives on top; a pizza “quatre saisons” with capers, mushrooms, cheese, and ham; a spicy pizza with a tangy tomato sauce, hot peppers and spicy pepperoni; and a pizza “di parma” with proscuitto, herbs, and white sauce. Also some Sprites and two plastic cups of red wine.

The only other party dining on the premises was a group of about seven Brits, one of whom had come up to the window next to me as I was paying, carrying a bottle of wine to ask after a corkscrew and some plastic cups. “Oh, you speak French, that’s lucky,” said the nice British lady. “I got him to sell me a whole bottle of wine but we haven’t any cups, can you ask?”

He came back, I asked, he showed her a single plastic cup and said, “Last one, no more.” (I had already been given my two cups of wine). She was perplexed and stammered.

I peered into the window and saw a tall stack of black-and-white-printed styrofoam cups, the sort you use for coffee. “Est-ce que vous pouvez lui donner ces… uh (the word for “cup” momentarily escaped me, darnit)… choses-là, pour les boissons chauds? Les noirs et blancs?”

He looked irritated and came back and pulled a few of them off the stack. “These are not for wine.” He handed them to her and as she went away, pleased, explained to me rapidly something that might have been: “How was I expected to know she would be willing to drink wine out of a coffee cup?” and might also have included: “She should have asked for the cups when I sold her the wine.” and definitely included an explanation that he was closing up shop tomorrow to go on vacation for ten days so he was letting his inventory run low on purpose. I am not sure whether he was being defensive or whether he was complaining about the bizarre willingness of the nice British lady to (a) ask for a whole bottle of wine or (b) drink wine out of an inappropriate container.

Anyway, we waited quite a while for the pizzas, as he was doing a brisk takeout business, but it was a lovely night and the little boys were pretty well-behaved. And when they arrived, the pizzas were delicious, and just the right amount of food; and my wine tasted lovely, perfect with the pizza, so that I was glad I had managed not to drink it all while we waited.
Even from a plastic cup.

 

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