Chances are good you won’t wake up tomorrow to a new post from me. I have been doing most of this travel blogging mid-morning, and tomorrow morning we load up our luggage in that beast of an SUV and drive to the Geneva airport. We’re supposed to return it in the French sector and then walk into Switzerland, if they let us do it that way.
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Let’s quickly summarize yesterday!
Yesterday morning, Mark went on a solo hike up towards the Aiguille de Midi, then across to the Cascade de Dard. He texted me some pictures.
I might have enjoyed that hike too, but (a) I needed to stay back to keep an eye on a kid who wasn’t feeling great and (b) everyone needs some alone time, so good for Mark for taking some.
What I did instead was nap. I dozed on and off and surfed the web on and off until about 2, and it felt really good. Sleep has been tricky for me and I needed to catch up on it.
After Mark got back I walked in town to the bookstore. This bookstore has a sizable English-language selection, so it is unsurprising that there should be a group of Americans there discussing their trip and looking at guide books. I was browsing regular French stuff, since how often do I get to do that, nearby. One of the American men said to one of the American women something like “what should I do with this?” and she answered hin in French, jokingly, “Stick it in your ass,” then looked at me, embarrassed, and apologized to me in French. Then she had to explain the joke in English to her friend or husband or whatever.
I didn’t say anything, preferring to amuse myself by letting them think I was a native, but now I kind of wish I’d made a “pardon my French” wisecrack.
Anyway, I picked out three very small paperbacks to add to my Francophone library. When I came out it was pouring rain again. I wrapped my books tightly in the sac en plastique from the shop and trudged back, stopping for a cappuccino under an awning.
In the evening we took Simon… bowling!
One of the hotels here advertised itself especially to families. It has two swings (the seats are made of snowboards) in the lobby. The hotel bar and restaurant is located in, well, a big rec room. There’s a board game library, a playroom for smaller kids, a foosball table, a touchable relief model of the Mont Blanc massif, a few pinball machines and an arcade game, and: two mini bowling lanes.
You buy tokens at the bar and put them in the slot, two per player, up to five players. The scoring software seems to be American-made with American bowling-alley rules; the main difference, a thirty-second shot clock for each throw. The ball is small, like a large grapefruit size with no holes, so you roll it underhand at the pins. The pins are also smaller and suspended independently on strings or cables. So instead of the usual pinsetter machine, an unseen tensioner pulls the strings to lift all the dangling pins up at the end of the first throw, and then sets down just the unstruck pins for your second try.
The lane is shorter too, as is the approach, so it took some getting used to, but the smaller ball was a lot easier and more natural to throw than a normal bowling ball. The three of us were more equalized than usual, although Mark still won.
Next to us in the other lane, we chatted with some folks from Ireland: a dad about 70 years old and three grown sons, plus a fifth man who may have been local. They weren’t familiar with the American scoring, so we explained, e.g., how you get extra points after a strike or spare. The family had just completed the hiking tour of Mont Blanc, a hut-to-hut hike that circles the massif. One of the young men lives in town, so we asked what it was like. He said it takes some getting used to, and that the buses and trains don’t run very conveniently outside high season. I think he said some things that made Mark more confident about perhaps planning a ski-only trip here in the near future (not with us, with the good skiers).
We ordered a beer for us (good beer from the brewpub near our rental) and an Orangina and some chicken fingers for Simon. Simon declared the chicken the best he’d had in France and made it known that he’d like to stay in this hotel someday.
After three rounds of bowling we headed back, left Simon at the house, and then went back out in the rain for dinner.
We considered the menu at a rather upscale place but I didn’t feel up to it, being kind of sore and crampy. I wanted either something light or something comfort-foody. I could have destroyed a bowl of mashed potatoes, I think, but a salad sounded good too.
We wound up at a new place where I drank champagne and had a trout “carpaccio” that was very like lox, with a crunchy toast that was very like a big bagel chip, and an ice-cream-scoop-sized blob of whipped herbed crème fraîche that played the role of cream cheese. (It was better, though, in a melt-in-your-mouth sort of way.) I followed it with a salad that wasn’t light at all. Good, though. And another glass of champagne.
Mark had classic French onion soup and a pesto ravioli. He didn’t drink anything since he had had most of the beer at the bowling place. So we didn’t get quite as amused with each other as we had the night before with the 92 centiliters of Côtes du Rhone. But we still had a good time.
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