That was me this morning. I think I figured out the sleep difference here. I have shifted my sleep patterns, but somehow I’ve acquired the ability to go back to sleep after being awakened at 4:30 a.m. French time, by, say, the sounds of a teenager tiptoeing downstairs to get on Discord with his D&D group on US Central Time.
And again back to sleep after responding to texts from the college freshman at 6:45 a.m. French time, about how it’s hard to get fed without your own kitchen, and hopefully next year an application for one of the on-campus studio apartments will be successful, and maybe the smoothie blender arriving from Amazon next week will help.
And again back to sleep after the phone beeps to tell me that Simon’s smartwatch has been removed from its charger (gotta turn that particular notification off, I guess, but I never noticed it at home because by then I was already awake).
+ + +
Yesterday we wanted to go up into the mountains to hike around. We googled a few “easy/family hikes,” then spread out the Chamonix Valley topo/hiking map on the table to look at some of the candidates.
It was the last day of the season for the La Flégère gondola, and none of us remembered ever taking that one before. There were several trails leading off from there, including one that would be a challenge for us but not impossible. 3 km out and 600 m climb to Lac Blanc, then back. We told the kids we would turn around if it felt like too much.
The gondolas are used for skiing during the winter and seat ten people. Despite the pleasant Sunday morning weather, it seemed uncrowded, although the parking lot was already full. The ride was, I think, less than ten minutes.
We had to go down before going up. This is pretty normal for a ski gondola. You want to go down from it to get anywhere.
The trail signs correspond pretty exactly to the trails marked on our map. We began our climb.
But the beginning of the trail had a lot of the steepness, and it was too tiring for the kids. So we hiked just past a little restaurant on the side of the hill and opened up our picnic.
Mark had fetched ham-and-butter, salami-and-butter, and “tandoori” sandwiches from the bakery, along with some pastries for Leo, who doesn’t like sandwiches.
The tandoori sandwich seemed to have replaced my favorite sandwich. (That would be tuna, with sliced egg and tomato, on a soft bread.) I’m guessing that they need to have one sandwich on hand that isn’t pork, much as a U.S. sandwich place would have a vegetarian option. (Vegetarian options exist reasonably commonly but are not ubiquitous here, and you have to read the fine print as they sometimes contain anchovies or even tuna anyway.)
The new sandwich, though, was really good, and I will try to replicate it at home. It contained sliced, probably poached, chicken in a mayonnaise sauce that was palely colored and lightly scented with curry; some salad greens that still retained some crispness; and what seemed to be cold, roasted tomatoes. They might have been what we’d call “sun-dried” tomatoes in the U.S.; they were concentrated in flavor and a bit salty; but they were juicier and not shriveled, so I’m going to go with oven-roasted. The sandwich loaf was a softer-crusted type, with poppy seeds. I expect that a good-quality poppy-seed kaiser roll would be the most easily found equivalent at home. Like the tuna sandwich, this one requires a softer crust than the ham and salami sandwiches do; you wouldn’t want to use something chewy like a bagel. The pasty insides would just squirt out when you tried to bite. No, this is a bread soft enough that you can share the sandwich just by tearing it into halves, thirds, or quarters with your hands. Perfect for a picnic!
After eating we started back down, enjoying the views. The boys did a little scrambling on piles of rock.
Then back up to the lift, where the boys rested and Mark and I looked around. I bought Simon a Haribo ice-cream push up; he reported that it had gummy bears frozen into it.
We observed that besides the hikes, you can access a via ferrata (definitely not my kind of thing) and a sort of roped-up alpine travel trail. I would enjoy neither, but maybe on some future trip it could be an outing for Mark and a braver, grown subset of our offspring.
Back down the gondola into town. There’s a golf course there that we sailed over as we came down. I don’t golf, but I bet it’s a really beautiful backdrop to play.
Mark went for a hike/run up this trail, not all the way.
I sat on the back deck, sunken below the yard, on my phone, listening to the river roaring a few yards away, and the train coming by every once in a while. Watching clouds come boiling down from the Mont Blanc side into town. Eventually it started to rain, so I came in (and texted Mark about the weather; up in the opposite foothills, Mark prepared to turn back).
For dinner, we suited up and went to fetch pizza. The brewpub closest to us, which claims to have pepperoni, wouldn’t open its kitchen for 45 minutes, so we walked an extra half kilometer or so to the next closest pizza place and carried it back in a reusable plastic bag.
This was a good pizza, the “Catalan,” with slabs of chorizo, green peppers, tomatoes, and olives. We had it with a bottle of bubbly, not champagne but Crémant de Bourgogne. Yum.
The kids didn’t like their pizza margarita though, so later (after I collapsed into bed) Mark went to get McDonald’s for them again.
Requests for McDonald’s have been increasing in frequency the longer we are away from home. And honestly, I get it.
bearing blog 