bear – ingn 1 the manner in which one comports oneself; 2 the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit; 3 a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~]; 4 pl comprehension of one’s position, environment, or situation; 5 the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].
Our school load is real but simplified enough here that I’ve been able to work with Simon in the morning and Leo in the late afternoon. And yesterday was the last workday! So when it was over I packed up all the schoolbooks into the rolling carry-ons.
Also some extra books we picked up on the way.
Mark wasn’t quite done with work but there were no more meetings, so I talked him into putting some of the work off till tomorrow so we could have another evening out. The kids opted to stay in, so first Mark put on his raincoat and rain pants and went to fetch pizza for them while I did some pre-packing.
Mainly, that was to lay out my clothes for the next three days, and to pack nearly everything else. I checked with the kids on their clean-clothes status; Leo had just done his laundry, but Simon needed to do a load of wash. He gathered it up for me and I put it into the combo washer-dryer along with a few odd things of mine.
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A side note.
Did I overpack? Not really, although I underestimated the hot weather/cold weather ratio. We did have both, but a lot more of it was hot. Autumn blew into the mountains only a couple of days ago. I also overestimated how often I’d need to dress up, so to speak. I expected to need at least one kind of dressy outfit in Menton, it being the Riviera and all. But it turned out to be pretty casual. Tees and sundresses and gauzy cotton pants everywhere. I did already know that Chamonix is the kind of place where people wear performance fleece and approach shoes out to dinner.
So, like, this purple wool dress is about as dressed up as I get here. With the turquoise puffy, very appropriate for around here. I happen to have a scarf that has both turquoise and purple in it. It makes me feel pulled-together.
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After Mark returned and the kids got their pizza, I put on my raincoat and we went out into the wet evening.
The mountains were entirely hidden by clouds (“socked in,” Mark said), and the light was fading, but the restaurants that were still open glowed in the mist. We walked almost to the other end of town before turning around. It was a pleasant walk even with the rain. Occasionally we stopped and looked at a menu board, but we both were thinking specifically of getting beef carpaccio, and we ended up at the same place Mark had fetched the pizza from.
Simon and I had had lunch there in the first week. The pizza is good, and it has a familiar, family-Italian-restaurant vibe. The interior is paneled with knotty pine, giving it an ambiance I associate with the north woods of Minnesota, and the dessert menu is printed on the placemats.
We ordered to share, a lettuce-and-tomato salad and a smallish beef carpaccio, topped with artichokes, oil, parmesan, and lemon, that came with a side of hot crispy fries.
(American Italian restaurants take note: Carpaccio with a side of fries needs to become a thing.)
We also ordered a 46-cL pitcher of red wine. Why 46, we wondered? The choices were 25, 46, and 100. (FYI, 75 cL is a bottle.) It was a pretty stoneware pitcher. After we’d drunk most of it, with a little still in our glasses, the next time the waiter came by I asked him why. He indicated that he had no idea and that it might have been 44 or 47 and it didn’t matter. I joked “en tout cas, le vrai problème, c’est qu’il est vide,” and turned the pitcher over to demonstrate its emptiness, which caused him to take it away and bring us another one. We decided not to object.
We considered dessert but Mark wanted more real food so we just got another carpaccio-and-fries instead. This is pretty normal behavior for us, fries for dessert. And at the end of the meal when the waiter came back I told him that it was lucky the pitchers were 46 cL because it turned out that 92 cL was the precise amount of wine we had needed to drink. Four-twenty-twelve!
I tipped the waiter well on the credit card machine because he had complimented my French and had read my mind about the wine. Back we went, still in the rain. A little darker now.
Time is running out! Need to pack in a few more experiences before Ieave.
Like breakfast out by myself! I walked in the drizzle all over, contemplating le saumon fumé et ses toasts or les pancakes avec le sirop d’érable or les oeufs grillés but decided that I could get smoked salmon, maple syrup pancakes, or fried eggs at home.
What is a little harder to get is a whole damn basket of two types of bread and a croissant, plus a little buffet of jams. butter, and chocolate sauce, plus a rosy freshly-juiced “detox aux légumes,” plus a double espresso with a teeny madeleine nestled in the spoon.
The price was 14€, for your reference, although I ended up ordering a second double espresso. (Yes, I got a second teeny madeleine.) And the juice, which was fairly beet-forward, was sweet and cold. I asked for a little sack to take home the croissant.
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It is day 23, and today (after I get home from breakfast) is the last work day. We worked yesterday too. Tomorrow is the last really free day, then a day that includes packing and cleaning up, then travel.
I think I am ready to come home. Maybe it’s the drizzly rain that will prevail for the rest of the week—we can’t even see the mountains for the clouds! Maybe I’ve just been, well, satisfied with the time we’ve had.
Are the remaining three days wasted on me? I don’t think so. They also serve a purpose.
Ever been annoyed when you can’t get all the toothpaste, or, say, anchovy paste, out of the tube? Or because of the design of, say, deodorant sticks that you turn to send more to the top, there’s always a bit that won’t come out. If you removed the “extra” there would still be something clinging to the package. So the wasted bits serve the function of letting the valuable stuff flow freely.
These last three days are the start of the transition back to the home life. This morning I composed a grocery list to send to Milo (our college senior who lives in our city) so he can put a few things in our fridge for when we stumble in at midnight. I sent a message to my virtual lifting coach asking for a workout week designed to ease me back in. Later I will RSVP Simon to the next Scout meeting on Monday. When it gets late enough to call the pediatrician, I will make appointments for flu and COVID shots sometime next week.
Today I’ll do some school with the boys, and after I’ve finished I’ll write a detailed note to myself for the week after next, so I remember where we left off. (I’ve planned a week of recovery just in case we need it.)
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If I didn’t have these last three days, now that I’m starting to think eagerly about seeing our friends, sipping coffee in my own chair, getting back to swimming and lifting, making macaroni and cheese or nachos—well, all these tasks would just shift back into the part of the trip where I didn’t want to think about going home.
So the timing is good after all.
And now that I have waxed philosophical, I guess I’ll eat this last madeleine, pay for my breakfast, and head back through the rain to my to-do list.
We’re leaving in four days. We aren’t going to finish it all. And we can’t take it all home. (Mark has said he will take responsibility for packing food items home and declaring it.) What have we bought?
Dry goods first. We have:
Cereal. The favorite brands of cereal that we can get here but not at home are Chocapic, which is vaguely like Cocoa Puffs only darker and petal-shaped; and Fitness, which is a flaky cereal that comes in chocolate or fruit flavors. We haven’t seen the fruit Fitness and are sad about it. We’ve also bought Cookie Crisp and something that’s very much like Cocoa Krispies.
Pasta. I’ve got some leftover Barilla tagliatelle from the time I made chicken noodle soup. It is, essentially, an egg noodle.
Ketchup. We just might finish off our second bottle before we leave. They have Heinz here. The kids approve.
Honey. Lavender honey. I’ve mostly put it in salad dressing, but I’ve also stirred it into yogurt and made peanut butter and honey sandwiches.
Peanut butter and Nutella. I think we’ll finish off the Nutella.
Nespresso pods. Last time, I seriously considered buying a Nespresso machine for at home. The only thing that stopped me was the packaging waste inherent in the Nespresso pods (and, uh, the fact that I already have a functional drip coffeemaker, and a French press, and an Aeropress, and a portable thingy that makes one cup at a time). Nespresso is much better than Keurig. I don’t even know why Keurig exists, to be honest.
Wine. Pretty sure we’ll finish this off before we go.
Bottles of mineral water. I am seriously going to miss the French mineral water situation. On the one hand, it’s kind of funny how many kinds there are. I have read French articles online in which, with a straight face, they write that you should drink several different kinds of mineral water in rotation (like having five vegetables and fruits per day) in order to make sure you get adequate amounts of all the different minerals you might need. But I am telling you they all taste different and I could seriously get behind the concept of having different mineral waters for different occasions, or possibly cravings.
Herbs and spices. I bought cumin, granulated garlic, bay leaves, and thyme to put in my cooking here. I am going to have to leave them in the kitchen, which already has a lot of abandoned herbs and spices.
Dijon mustard. Like the honey, mostly in salad dressing. Note: Last time I brought French’s mustard with me for Simon. I didn’t need to, as it was in the grocery store here. This time I didn’t bring it, and there wasn’t any. Simon has coped, but he would have been a lot happier with yellow American mustard.
Square crustless sliced white bread. The Harry’s brand is about as close to American sliced white bread as you get. Labeled “100 percent mie” means that there is no crust. Simon adores it. It is slightly denser and tastier than, say, Wonder bread.. I admit to having made a couple of sandwiches on it with French mayonnaise and Italian mortadella. It tastes like the best baloney sandwich ever.
Couscous. Simon is rather fond of plain couscous with butter, and it’s about as easy a thing to make as possible (5 min soak in boiling water), so we made sure to buy it on our very first trip to the grocery store. We haven’t come close to finishing the box.
Cookies. You know the “Le Petit Ecolier” cookies you can get in the regular grocery store at home? They look like a little chocolate rectangle in a picture frame of bland rectangular cookie? Well, they come in dark chocolate here, and Mark adores them. I don’t quite get it.
Now, the refrigerator.
Milk. Milk here is largely shelf-stable, but you must refrigerate it after you open it. It’s basically here for the cereal. I think there will be a lot left over when we leave.
Butter. Two kinds. Demi-sel, which is like normal salted butter in the U. S. except ten thousand times better, eat-it-with-a-spoon better. And a kind that has salt crystals in it that make it crunchy. I am actually angry that American butter doesn’t come close to this stuff.
Blueberries. Fruit takes some getting used to. It’s all perfectly ripe within 1-2 days of buying it from the store. This is okay with melons (oh goodness the melons are so good) as if you stick them in the fridge they stay good for a while. Berries, well, you need to eat them right away. I bought a tub of blueberries-blackberries-raspberries yesterday and didn’t get to them, and they were perfect yesterday and a big fuzzy mold ball today. Really, if you need ripe fruit today you have to buy it today. So we’ve wasted some fruit. But on the plus side, we’ve had some really good fruit when we’ve bought it correctly.
Bagged salad. This is basically the same as at home, maybe tending to be a little more on the bitter-greens side, which is fine with me.
Sliced rosette de Lyon salami and sliced English cheddar. This is for Simon, who is content to eat salami-and-cheddar sandwiches on the crustless white bread at any meal.
Jambon de serrano, etc. This is for Mark and me. We don’t get tired of it.
A cheese I bought that was a little too stinky for me to comfortably eat. I love cheese, but I have a limit to how much really ripe stuff I can eat at once. This one was Morbier and I was attracted to it because it had a pretty ash layer like Humboldt Fog. But it was fairly strong. I ate some but I won’t finish it.
Way too many marmalades and jellies. The strawberry went to the kids’ PB&Js and into tubs of plain yogurt. There’s some orange and lemon marmalades from Menton (famous for citrus) that I think we haven’t opened yet? Those might come home with us. Also I bought Mark a pistachio-and-sugar spread that hasn’t been opened and I do hope it comes home.
Capers and olives. Had to! We were in Provence! Won’t eat them all in time though.
Several pizza boxes with partial leftover pizzas. Both towns we have stayed in were near the border with Italy. Lots of pizza to be had. Lots of pizza leftovers.
Yogurt. We might finish the yogurt. Simon doesn’t normally even like yogurt and he has been polishing off French strawberry yogurt. Much like the butter, it’s hard to describe how much better the stuff is than what we can get at home. Especially the plain stuff. And the related stuff like fromage frais and skyr. I love it too.
Lardons. I bought lardons just today to make pasta with. Every French grocery store has convenient little packages of, essentially, raw bacon already chopped into little matchsticks. Perfect for sautéing in olive oil, then adding minced onion and canned tomatoes for spaghetti all’amatriciana. Or cooking with cream and butter and adding crozet pasta and cheese for a rich Savoyarde specialty.
Marinara sauce. For emergencies with the kids.
Old El Paso salsa. Old El Paso is the face of Mexican food in France. They have total market saturation. Leo’s Swiss friend saw the jar on the counter and said swooningly, “That’s my favorite stuff.” We tried to explain Old El Paso’s place in the hierarchy of Mexican-American cuisine and I do not think they believed us.
Prune juice. To improve someone’s regularity. No more details needed, I trust.
Much more food has passed through the kitchen but only for a couple of hours on its way into a meal: some chicken thighs and celery for soup, spaghetti and canned or jarred tomatoes for sauce, cod and lemons and potatoes for a buttery baked dish that used about half the capers as well. Also, a great deal more charcuterie and cookies. But we won’t need to worry about getting rid of those things in a few days because they did not last long enough to keep.
Cooking in a pristine rental kitchen (especially one as well-appointed as this one) is lots of fun. But I will be glad to get back to a kitchen where the jar of cumin lasts for several meals instead of just one.
Just a really quick note here to say that—I think—my stuff has all been migrated? Correctly? I’ve checked a couple of old posts, and it does seem that the images are pointing to the WordPress media library instead of to my old T***P*d website. Fingers crossed!
There’s definitely going to be some weirdnesses. (I can NOT complain.) For example, my media library is kind of a mess, because every single image was imported on the same day. Also, I don’t have my front page very well designed yet, and I don’t have links (even dead ones) to an archive, or to an “About the Author” type page, or anything like that.
Those cosmetic things, and structural things, will come in time.
For now, I just want to send a HUGE shout out to the people at WordPress. I had to make a number of decisions very rapidly, such as “where to go” and “what plan to buy,” and I am very, very happy that I paid for a higher-tier subscription that came with seriously good customer support. I cannot even IMAGINE what it must have been like behind the scenes, because I cannot be the only person who was unceremoniously dumped out of T***P*d with only about five weeks to get everything moved over.
I might, however, be the only person with an almost-twenty-year-old-blog who wasn’t able to get to her home computer at all for four of those five weeks.
Anyway, what I wound up doing was turning the import process over to the WP people. Developers, I guess, had to tweak their import tools to make it all work, if not make a brand new import tool from scratch. THANK YOU WORDPRESS.
I’m also going to add here: the customer service was FRIENDLY and MOSTLY HUMAN and VERY SUPPORTIVE. (Yeah, there’s a chatbot some of the time, but it’s a pretty good chatbot. Tech support is one of the good uses of chatbots.) If you, too, need to move your blog from a sinking service provider, I highly recommend WordPress.
This is the end of this unscheduled announcement. Stay tuned while I actually learn to use the design tools and make my blog look and feel a little bit more familiar and, I hope, a lot more user friendly. (That might have to wait till October.)
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).
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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.
Up in the gondola.
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.
This is what hiking trail signage looks like in the area. I don’t know if it’s the same all over France or not.
The trail signs correspond pretty exactly to the trails marked on our map. We began our climb.
Bilberries!
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.
I got the philosophy off my chest first, now a few items from yesterday. For the sake of remembering it all.
There’s a little alpine coaster on the edge of the other end of town in a tiny amusement park. The kids wanted to go so we drove over there and bought them six rides to share. We’ve been here before, with smaller kids who rode the smaller rides. Remember Oscar and Leo playing on those bumper cars? We remember.
Then we headed back. Mark went to buy McDonald’s for the kids, who I guess were craving it, and I went to the grocery store for some dinner items. After we met back at the rental and I unloaded groceries, Mark and I slipped out for a quick lunch together. Crêpe for me (buckwheat, with spinach, emmenthal, cream, and an egg); omelette for Mark; draft Breton cider to share.
We picked up a baguette and I sent Mark back with it; he had an appointment to pick up a rental bike for Leo. I stayed in town and did a little shopping. I needed a hooded fleece jacket and a pair of new approach shoes.
Foreshadowing: these are my new shoes, on their inaugural trek the next day
Leo had fun riding the bike around town for a while. Then we got in the car and went to the anticipatory Mass to free up our Sunday morning. It’s all one parish here in the valley, the parish of St. Bernard (yes, that St. Bernard), but there is a church in each little town. Five p.m. Saturday was in Vallorcine, a twenty-five-minute drive away.
At Our Lady of the Assumption.
We could hear the bells as we walked up the hill—not church bells, but cow bells. Saw some belled cows up close in fact.
Inside, it was several degrees cooler, and I put on my sweater. Mass was simple and quite short, singing but with cantor only, no music. A good cantor, a well-made song sheet. Easy to follow along.
The priest was a clear speaker as well. I could skim the main points from the homily without much difficulty, even if I could not catch all the details. Money: it doesn’t make you smarter, it doesn’t make you kinder. It can hide spiritual malaise. Jesus was the friend to the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the exploited. We must ask ourselves: what should we do with our goods? Why do we have goods? We have those goods so that we can share them.
Simon was restless and whimpering on the hard pew (no kneelers; I saw no one kneel except for brief genuflections) so we slipped out a little early, right after Communion, for the sake of the folks around us, and settled him down outside in the sun on the porch before descending to our beast of a car.
I made an easy dinner. Pasta for the boys, with butter on the noodles and an optional tomato-basil sauce; blueberries and baguette. Simon adores buttered noodles and wouldn’t stop raving about what a great meal I’d made.
I don’t know what to tell you, kid. It’s the French butter doing all the work here.
For Mark and me I made, from memory, a stovetop-to-oven dish that’s especially tasty when you have good bread. You fry up sliced garlic in a generous amount of olive oil, then just before it burns stir in tomato paste (watch the spatter), a couple of cans’ worth of drained white beans, a bit of hot water (I used the kids’ pasta water), salt and pepper. Top with mozzarella cheese (any kind) and bake at 475°F till melty and bubbly. Scoop up with that good bread. Or whatever. Remember not to burn your mouth.
We also had some olives and a little pâté, and some dressed greens from a bag, and a bottle of Bordeaux.
MJ called us from lunchtime at college and we got to hear a little about how things were going, as we yawned in our pajamas. That was a good voice to hear and face to see, at the end of a good day. A Saturday for the books.
This morning I woke up for the first time in, oh, three weeks with a slight, but familiar, sense of dread. It took me a minute to figure out that the dread was about: In four days we have to pack all this stuff into our suitcases. It is the dread of unfinished business, something that I almost always have, and that I’ve been able to do without since we made it into the first rental apartment.
The unfinished business of packing in a few days is a relatively small business; we can probably do it in a couple of hours of focused work. But it is also a sort of a cork in a bottle, behind which (imagine a cartoon bottle, vibrating gently) is all the other unfinished business. Some is unpleasant, some is neutral, much is actually pleasant and satisfying business, but it’s all stuff that has to be done. And it’s not that I want to live without the stuff for the rest of my life, but it has been lovely to live without most of the has-to-be-done of it all for a couple of weeks.
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On each of our trips I have learned a little something to take back, something to make my life marginally better even if in only a little way.
Our first trip was really the first time I went climbing on rock, and while it didn’t turn into a huge lifestyle change for me, it is something I enjoy doing once in a while, and I’m glad I know something now, in a tactile way, about this thing that Mark and my older kids really love to do.
I also learned that the small luxury of drinking fizzy water instead of plain tap water was something I wanted to have all the time. A funny, small thing to take home, and one that you know, costs a little money, but it’s a lot of pleasure for not that much. Also I am pretty sure I drink more water this way, so maybe it is good for me.
That’s just to give you a couple of examples.
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I would like to take home with me this time some sense of the lifting of the weight of the have-to-do-it. I do not know how I can do this, given that, uh, I still have to do the things.
I am used to that sense of weight bearing down on me, a little red timer ticking away invisibly just out of my peripheral vision, or a host of those timers, never letting me quite relax and rest. Not only am I used to it, the urgency, the open loops turning in my head: I am dependent on it. I believe, deep down, that if I wasn’t thinking about all the things I have to do all the time, I wouldn’t do them. At least not in time to prevent something awful.
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Something about being here for long enough, possibly the distance, possibly the impotence that distance brings, has lifted the weight. There’s still a lot of stuff that I have to do when I get back. But I am somewhere else and I cannot do it now, and somehow I have mentally shelved it all, or at least stuffed it in the bottle behind packing on Thursday. And yet I’m not worried I’ll lose the threads when I need to pick them up.
I wonder if there’s an attitude shift I can possibly make that will keep me on a journey even after I’m home. Hmm?
I had a migraine this morning, so I stayed in bed through my, er, usual writing time. That makes it sound like a habit!
A brief summary of yesterday (Friday):
• Mark went up to the top with a guide/pilot to try to fly from up there
• He did get to go out onto the ridge, which he described to me in frankly terrifying terms but that he pronounced as “fun” and “the real experience”
• Unfortunately the weather was unusually windy there, even though at other altitudes it was perfectly fine (in fact people were steadily parapenting from higher up off Mont Blanc) and even though the forecast had been good. The pilot/guide, who was not psycho, told Mark, “I do not understand the weather. And when I do not understand the weather, I do not fly.” He was going to not charge Mark at all, but seeing as “deciding when to not do a thing” is a key function of a mountain guide, Mark paid him some money and bought them coffee and pie at the restaurant.
• After lunch we took the boys climbing for a couple of hours at Les Gaillands, which might be the best beginner’s rock wall in the world.
• I put on my climbing shoes for the first time in a while. I don’t remember when was the last time I climbed on rock.
My brain stem is out of practice at tolerating heights. All I did was climb up about 10-15 feet, maybe a little more at Mark’s direction, and work for a while at desensitizing myself to the feel of the rope, the harness, the feet flat on the wall. I took deep breaths. I let go of the rope and let my hands dangle behind me. I concentrated on the muscles of my calves, lower back, shoulders, releasing the tension one by one. I flexed my knees and bounced gently.
In a moment, I’d ask Mark to let out rope for me to walk backwards down the wall. I reflected how with these exercises, I was working a little bit to trust—not so much with my mind but with my body, my reflexes—the rope and the anchor and the harness. I wasn’t working hard to trust Mark. He wasn’t going to drop me. Not even a little bit. I mean, later he would let out rope so I could come down, and there’s always a little startling jolt when it begins, and I’d have to mentally prep for that. But he wasn’t going do it till I was ready, and I mknew that all the way down in my bones. Or brain stem.
I thought about the Discourse going around right now about grooms smashing wedding cake in the brides’ faces after saying they wouldn’t. I thought: Glad I didn’t marry That Kind of Dude. Because it isn’t too hard to imagine there being folks out there who might drop you a little, for fun.
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After that, while Mark cleaned up the anchor, I walked with the boys down to the little outdoor buvette, concession stand. They had sodas and fries. I had a glass of cider.
We hiked back up, I dug our wedding rings out of the backpack and we put them back on, and then back to the rental.
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I was resting on the couch and Mark brought me a glass of wine to decide on the next procedure. What happened next is that he went and fetched McDonald’s for the kids, so that we could go out for a dinner date. We wound up walking all over town, chatting, ending up at a restaurant we’d had a great meal at eight years ago.
And you know what, it was really delicious and a good time and a pleasant walk. But I did not take any pictures, so you’ll have to trust me.
So this is day 19, easy to keep track of since we arrived on September first. We leave in a week. How long did it take to get used to the time difference? To being here in general?
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Sleeping first. It was maybe two or three days before I had gotten enough rest to recover from the overnight travel and for the clock time to stop feeling wrong. But I don’t think I ever fully shifted my sleep patterns. I am waking much later in the morning, some days not till 9 am. I am going to bed fairly early, soon after a late-ish dinner. I have a bout of wakefulness every night in the wee hours. I need an afternoon rest time.
I don’t remember having this issue before. Is it age-related, perimenopausal restlessness? Is it anything to do with Mark’s having to call in to work meetings, sometimes at 10:30 p.m., with people in the Midwest? Is it a relic from the couple of years I spent getting up to give a 2:30 a.m. dose of medication to a teenager? Or is it from being mentally checked in to the U.S. news cycle and the activity patterns of my friends on social media? (I’ve already run out of high speed data on our temporary international plan.)
It could really be any of these. In our current circumstances, it isn’t really a big problem, though. We have the space and time to rest, and it’s okay to keep weird homeschooling hours on days when we school.
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My appetite has been off kilter for sure. Not the amounts but the timing.
I almost can’t eat breakfast. I can manage a yogurt cup before eleven, and maybe a glass of juice. I mean, if someone goes and brings back pastries, I can eat those, but it is not because I am hungry. And I can drink coffee, about the same amount of caffeine in the morning as I always do. I like the Nespresso machine a lot. Two pods set on the “longest” setting, one on top of the other, makes one satisfactory cup of coffee.
Then later, especially if I didn’t eat pastry or yogurt, I get ravenous around 1 pm. We’ve been having our biggest meal at lunch time, and that seems to suit, since Mark often has a string of meetings around dinner time. That’s when we tend to go to a restaurant with the kids and have a slower paced meal, with wine, and usually we decline the dessert course and go get ice cream cones afterwards. So we’re done with the big lunch around 2:30 or 3.
If I need to shop for dinner, that’s when I go. The kids are resting, Mark is working, and I am full of lunch and will not be tempted to buy all the good things.
Often I’m not even really hungry when dinner rolls around. I’ve cooked a full meal a few times, but a lot of dinners are charcuterie, cheese, bread, butter. Olives, maybe, or a jar of tuna-stuffed cherry peppers. Salad greens. And a bottle of wine. Sometimes Mark and I go out. It was easy to have a light dinner in Menton, like broiled fish or steamed mussels; the fare up here in the mountains is heartier. I can’t finish my salads.
Last night I felt so full after dinner, and the not-enormous quantity of wine had gone so much to my head, that I felt like I really needed a day to live on mineral water and plain yogurt.
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It could be that I felt off, stuffed, because yesterday was the first day in a while that I did not do a lot of walking. It was a work day for us, and based on Mark’s meeting schedule we decided to stay in the house for lunch. We had enough food on hand, including leftover homemade chicken soup. So I didn’t go anywhere at all till it was time to take the kids out, first shopping for climbing shoes, and then dinner as Leo requested at Annapurna, the Indian restaurant that has been here since the early 90s.
Physical activity patterns: so different for all of us. Leo, who has an orthopedic issue which limits his leg endurance, has walked more than I think he has in years, mostly on his own exploring. I have gone shopping for food and other necessities most days, on foot, carrying groceries back in reusable shopping bags that are definitely coming home with me as utilitarian-yet-slightly-chic souvenirs. Our rental house is 500 meters down a street that’s pinched between the river and the train tracks, so there’s a bit of a hike to get anywhere.
There’s a walk after dinner almost every night, even the evenings we dine at home, because that is how you get gelato.
But on-purpose exercise totally fizzled out. Mark’s not been doing much running; he gave himself shin splints on one hill run in Menton. As for my routine, lap swimming is out, and I don’t do open water. Obviously I cannot bring my free weights here. I didn’t feel motivated to join a salle de musculation seeing as I prefer lifting privately at home. I did bring a set of resistance bands and I did one session with them back in Menton… but…
…I feel tired and sore, the good kind of tired and sore, from all the walking all the time! It very much feels like I’ve had enough exercise. I don’t know if it’s an illusion or not but it sure feels like I fall into bed every night with aching, used muscles all over. Just as if I had swum a mile or run 5K.
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I am really curious how fast I can reintegrate into our normal life back home. I wonder if any new habits will persist, for better or for worse.
I did hear that there is going to be a new ice cream place going in to our neighborhood, within walking distance…
So I mentioned that I had a story from lunch. As we were walking back across town from the landing field, I asked the boys what they wanted to have for lunch. Simon said, “Fries and a cheeseburger, the good ones at that one restaurant,” and Leo agreed.
I knew which one they meant. There’s a restaurant called L’Hydromel which is not only a restaurant but a meadery. (“Hydromel” is mead.) They were in business last time we came to Chamonix, and back then I ordered the tasting flight of six meads to try, which was fantastic, if you ever have a chance to taste six different meads at once I highly recommend it. There’s far more variation in flavor than you might expect.
We’d already had one meal there this week, and had discovered that they have the best French fries of anywhere in France, the sort you would get in a really good American bar and grill or maybe even an upscale place that has steak-and-fries. Deeply brown and crispy, salted. Proper fries. And they do a smashburger. Correctly. I was perfectly happy to return, so I texted to Mark to meet us there. We ordered sodas and burgers for the kids, a flight of liqueurs for Mark and me; I ordered a “berliner” sandwich; fries for everyone.
The wait staff we’ve had all the times has been really friendly, and when the waiter came by a bit later and asked how we were doing, I told him how the kids had just done their first parapente and so we were celebrating. He congratulated them, and also complimented my French, which always makes me feel good. I suppose the liqueurs had helped it along a little.
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The restaurant is in the pedestrian-only zone of Chamonix. It’s signed like this:
The sign reads: Pedestrian zone from 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. No entry except for authorized vehicles. Note the pedestrian-only icon painted on the road pavement to the left, and the raised, wide sidewalk (with the big planter in it in the background) to the left of the road.
But for some reason, there was a car parked on the wide sidewalk, just in front of one of the big tree planters spaced along here and there in front of the stores.
And it was not an ordinary car. It was a cherry-red antique rally car.
Intriguing! It was the sort of thing one might expect that a store owner would pay to have in front of the store for a while to attract customers, maybe, if he sold aviator sunglasses or driving shoes. However, this car was parked in front of a lingerie boutique. Curious. Even curiouser, the car had a Louisiana license plate. What?
The car attracted attention. People were coming to look at it and take pictures. At one point in our lunch we overheard a conversation in accented English, between the two gentlemen who were having lunch at the table behind me and a passerby, and we gradually realized that the two gentlemen were the ones who had driven the car here and parked it.
The gist of this is that they were taking part in an annual navigational rally of historical vehicles (the Tour of Legends) over the weekend. They mentioned getting lost, and it seems they were mid-rally right now and had accidentally skipped a town and gotten to Chamonix too early. And decided to have lunch.
Anyway, they (one might have been French, I’m not sure, but one of them was Irish) were telling the young man on the other side of the fence, who was from Poland, about the history of said car. It is the Ferrari LM Sport which, driven by Piero Taruffi, won the Giro di Sicilia rally in May 1955. And now it’s a collector’s item, I guess. We never did hear why it has a Louisiana license plate.
At one point one of the gentlemen shouted over the fence at a woman who was taking pictures, because she came rather close to the car and he thought she might try to sit on it. “Touche pas, huh,” I said to him, but he did not think that was funny.
Mark went and took a few more pictures of the car to send to a Car Guy friend of his, who, he thought, might appreciate the photos. I hadn’t figured this out at this point, but Mark had come to the realization that this was an eight-to-ten-million-dollar car.
(Mark’s friend the Car Guy was suitably appreciative of the photos.)
Anyway, as the gentleman were coming to the close of their lunch, the waiter gently came by and indicated that they should look out in the street, where what should we all spy but three members of the municipal police, standing around and looking extremely put out by the existence, on the sidewalk, in the zone where no one is supposed to be driving anyway, not just a car but an Italian car with American plates.
Cue the gentlemen hastily getting up and going over to explain to the French police what in the world they thought they were doing parking there.
Mark found this whole situation excruciatingly funny, but he had to explain to me why it was so funny. “Because if you wanted to have this car park in your town in order to attract attention and people to the shops, there is no way you could pay anyone to bring it here. But now that it’s here they definitely don’t want it here, it’s only a nuisance. And also, what I think happened here is they wanted to have lunch in Chamonix but they didn’t want to leave the car somewhere they couldn’t keep an eye on it. But practically the whole town is a pedestrian zone. So they just decided to drive into the pedestrian zone and park the car on the sidewalk where they could see it from where they were eating. I don’t know why they thought they wouldn’t get in trouble for it.”
The waiter came by and I said to him, “I was asking myself how they got permission to park there! I suppose they just thought that their car was so cool” (I used the English word) “that no one would stop them?”
The waiter shrugged and said, “They’re being completely stupid. At this time of day, you can’t have delivery vehicles here, you can’t even drive a postal truck. And you definitely can’t park a private vehicle on the sidewalk like that.”
After discussing the situation with the police for a few minutes they realized they had to move the car. So they (I am not kidding) pulled out a set of vintage leather driving helmets with vintage driving goggles and shoved them down over their heads, at which point it started to feel like a scene directed by Terry Gilliam.
They climbed into the car and spectators started to back away, many of them (including Mark) recording the scene on their cell phones. “Attention!” one of them snapped, rather huffily, at the three cops who were all standing behind the car gesturing at him. “Attention à la fume!” As in, get out of the way or you are going to be eating my exhaust.
And then he attempted to start the engine, but it took a moment or two before it really turned over, which was perhaps a little anticlimactic for his taste, I don’t know. But he got it going eventually.
Anyway, Mark was so glad he had not hiked down the mountain, because he would have hated to have missed this, and without his help I would never have caught the significance. Maybe our older kids would have, since they spent a significant chunk of their childhoods bingeing Top Gear.
Yesterday was a big day. The weather was fine, and we had an appointment to keep at the base of the Aiguille de Midi.
The Chamonix valley is surrounded by aiguilles, needles, spires of rock at the tips of the mountains close by. One of them is the “needle of noon,” I suppose a reference to the sun’s zenith, and it has a gondola going up almost all the way to it, and a sort of visitor center built around it, with exits to get out onto the glacier if you have the right kind of footwear. Not that people don’t sometimes try to get out there with the wrong footwear, just to take a selfie.
But you don’t get all the way up in one go; you first take a gondola up to the Plan de Midi, the “flat surface,” I guess, where there is another sort of visitor center and also a little restaurant, and you can exit there in more-or-less normal footwear, although I recommend sturdy hiking boots. There are many lovely walks you can take; you are up in the mountains, but down where there is scrubby grass and trees and walking trails. Often there is snow up there still in the summer.
There’s another gondola on the other side of town that will take you up to a different Plan, but it’s closed this week. So we had to, um, change Plans.
Plan from which the kids would fly!
See him? That little speck?
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Day before yesterday, while Mark and I were having our dinner between meetings, he was exchanging texts with a mountain guide we know who has taken our family on outings here before, one whom Mark has befriended. The guide’s name is Jeff, so we call him Guide Jeff or sometimes Jeff Guide Jeff because we have a Rule of Jeffs (“all men named Jeff must be referred to with a specifier”, because we know several Jeffs, such as Jeff Christy’s Jeff and Jeff Lori’s Jeff). We also have a Rule of Erics. I digress.
Anyway, Mark was telling Guide Jeff about our plans for the day. Guide Jeff knows a lot of the people who are running stuff up in the mountains, so he asked, “Who are you getting to take the kids parapenting?” (Parapente is the French word for “paragliding” and English speakers around here tend to anglicize it.)
And Mark explained that we had connected with the same person we’d hired before, whom we’d met through another English-speaking family we ran into on our first trip to the area. “We feel like we’re really in good hands with Sandie. She’s a world champion parapenter and has European and French titles as well,” Mark typed. (In fact, she piloted the Olympic torch down from the Aiguille de Midi in 2024 as part of a Chamonix relay team of 24 torchbearers. Article and video here!)
I could almost hear the tone in Jeff Guide Jeff’s voice when after a beat he texted back, “You do realize that means she’s a total psycho, right?”
Ha ha. No, okay, maybe a little, but we trust her. She already canceled our Monday appointment because she felt it was too windy to take clients down, and warned us to tell the kids we would probably see plenty of people parasailing anyway because they didn’t mind the increased risk. And she’s already piloted for Oscar (14 at the time) and MJ (11 at the time), and she was absolutely great with the kids. Patient and firm. You gotta do what the pilot tells you at 2300 m, 1300 m above the ground where you will land.
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We met Sandie at the Aiguille de Midi gondola station in town, fresh from the pastry shop. I had bought tickets for Mark and the boys: aller-retour (up and back) for him, aller simple (one way) for them.
None for me, because my job was to meet them at the bottom. I hope to get up there for a hike while we’re here, though.
Sandie was to fly with Simon, and her colleague M. was to pilot Leo. “He’s in a traffic jam,” she said, “he will meet us on the plan.” She had reserved the places on the gondola (the tickets are good for whenever, but you get a reservation for a specific time) and so off they went into the line.
That’s Sandie with the high ponytail and navy puffer coat.
I left them there and headed off to the atterrissage, the landing field, which is toward the other end of town, a 25-minute walk. That’s about as long as the least possible time it could take them to get up there, get set up, and take off, and I was pretty confident they would take longer than that, so I walked at a brisk but unhurried pace. The route goes into the town, along the river Arve for quite a ways. Past the high school where I could see teenagers dimly through the glass eating in the cafeteria, past the national ski-and-alpinism school (ENSA/ENSM), past the 1924 Olympic stadium (now a modern, open running track), ending up in a wide, flat field.
In the field, recently-landed parapenters are rolling up their wings and stuffing them in a pack, chatting about the weather, and where they are from, and where they learned to fly.
I went and sat on a bench and waited for information from Mark and from Sandie. Happily, there is good cell phone reception, at least on this day, from where they were on the mountain.
Mark sent me photos of the wings (les voiles, or “sails,” in French) being unfurled from the top, so I would recognize them at the bottom. Sandie and Simon would be flying a blue wing with the Brooks logo in white.
See the town below? That isn’t Chamonix, I think it’s maybe Les Houches based on the curve of the river, but it gives you an idea of the height.
“Second gliders mainly blue with a little yellow on the back,” sent Sandie, “We are in the lift take off around 15 min.” That was at 12:15, so I knew when to expect.
After a while I got a text from Mark saying “Simon in the air! Leo on deck” and then a four minutes later “Leo is up. Pilot doing fun turns”
(Later, I would get to see video of the takeoffs. Simon apparently flubbed his first takeoff by sitting down when he was told “Don’t sit down.” Remember, I said you have to do what the pilot says! But they recovered and made a second takeoff, and this time ith worked fine. The passenger has to do the running, with the pilot managing the wing from behind. A running start down the mountain, the pilot looking back and up and adjusting cords as you go, the wind swoops the sail up, and then you just sort of run right into the air. They take off, Sandie settles herself behind, and swoop off. You hear Simon’s voice calling “Bye, Dad!” and Mark calling “Bye!”)
(Leo’s video is a lot smoother and quicker. Apparently that pilot is a bit of a daredevil, because, Leo told me later, he asked Leo right away, “Want to do some tricks?”
Absolutely! said Leo.)
Later, I received this selfie:
“Watching,” I texted. “Don’t see anyone yet.”
There were some other wings in the air, but the glare from the sun in that direction was too bright to let me make out the color of any of the wings. Mark let me know when they went out over the glacier’s tail and when they disappeared from his view up high.
Not long after that, I could tell there were three, then four, wings in the air. “I see S,” I texted to Mark. The blue-and-white wing with the Brooks logo was distinctive. They went around and around in gentle spirals. Sandie was giving him a long, gentle ride.
I expected to be able to shoot one video of Simon landing and then one video of Leo landing, but Leo’s more aggressive pilot took off second but landed first. Mid-video I realized Leo was coming in quicker (and doing wild swings and loops). There’s a point on the video where you hear me mutter “Oh my God I can hear them screaming.” Shrieks of delight, actually.
Leo lands first, running feet from the air right down onto the ground, and the wing swings down in front of them. I turn 90 degrees to watch Simon land, calling out “Be there in a sec!” and down comes Simon gently, the wing billowing down to the ground in front.
Happy, happy kids. I remember a couple minutes later to text Mark that they are down safe and happy. He texts me that he gave the kids the tip money and to remind them to tip the pilots, which they do.
I shake hands with Leo’s pilot and get to hear about their antics. Leo’s pilot, it turns out, the one who likes loop-de-loops, is the one who will take Mark on a little climb-and-fly “from the top” if the weather is good on Friday. He speaks a little English, enough to guide Anglophone clients; Leo told me that between the two of them they spoke some in French and some in English, which makes me happy because it’s a good milestone for a young language learner, to be able to bridge that gap by working back and forth.
The pilot airdropped me the selfies he took with Leo mid-air. Sandie came over to look. “Oh, I would never take selfies while flying,” she said, “I’d be too scared.” Controlling the wing? I wonder, but she means she’d be afraid she’d drop her phone.
Leo said: “It was crazy, Mom! He didn’t have a lanyard or a strap on his phone at all! He just took it out of his pocket and took pictures and then put it back in his pocket!”
I’m letting Mark go climbing with this guy on Friday? I wondered. I’ll have to let Jeff Guide Jeff know that we’ve found the total psycho!
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So we said goodbye to the guides, au revoir to Sandie and à bientôt to the guide-who-takes-unprotected-selfies, and walked back towards town. Mark asked whether I wanted him to come down on the tram or whether it would be okay for him to hike the two and a half hours down the mountain, and I first texted “Are you kidding me” and then “Come down now” because I wanted to have lunch with him.
And we are both very glad that I did demand that, not just because we were able to share a lunchtime dégustation (tasting flight) of six mountain liqueurs amounting to nearly three shots each.
The lunchtime spectacle turned out to be very worthwhile! But that, my friends, is another story, which I hope to get to later today.
I got up early-ish in the morning, made a double Nespresso (two pods one after the other), and started working on my blog migration. You see, the text of the blog has moved over to WP, but the images haven’t really. As of right now, they are all still pointing at the doomed Typepad site, which is currently the only repository of information tying each photo to the post where it appears.
This migration is supposed to have happened more seamlessly, and possibly is a result of bandwidth demands on Typepad’s servers as an unknown number of other folks like me try to download everything in a span of originally 35 days. Now 13 days.
Despite not being at all monetized, I shelled out for the WordPress Business Plan so I would not be alone and have to figure out how to work it under time pressure and while out of the country. Now I am negatively monetized, and I am not sorry. I have access to their good tech support. I will be the opposite of sorry if they manage to save (rescue, but also download) my media library and links.
Thanks to the Business Plan, for the time being, I have been helped first by being able to access an unusually informative assist chatbot and eventually, when my troubles exhausted the fancy troubleshooting manual that is the essence of a chatbot, by a very friendly and supportive human named Arun, who said kind things to me that made me feel like I deserved help because after all I have “nearly two decades of blogging” to be proud of.
And here I was feeling apologetic because my ginormous export file is so big it’s gumming up the works.
Thanks, Arun. (Although I now am also reeling in the years. I once blogged a newborn baby who is now a college freshman.)
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So that was a big chunk of my morning, I sat there, typing on this laptop that Mark got and cloned to his home computer just in case he needed to deal with something other than work, going through Nespresso pods, following tech support instructions, and contemplating whether this was vacation or work.
At first I was kind of grumbly. Here I am on vacation struggling with tech support. It’s like work!
But then I remembered that I do this for free because I like writing stuff. That I have no interest in growing my audience except to get to meet new people I like to exchange comments with, maybe even argue a little, but thoughtful and kind people who are fun to argue with and fun to agree with.
And I realized that being over here, away from our demanding stuff, unable to attend meetings or take the kids to scheduled activities for this short time, is actually one of the things that vacation is for. Giving breathing space to reconnect with, you know, hobbies. Things we do because we like them.
And hobbies do often include frustrating moments that suck up your time in between the fun, flowy parts.
So perhaps the compelled blog migration could not have come at a better time for me. I have the space for it. Let’s hope Arun at WordPress can find the bandwidth for it!
(ADDED LATER. Jamie is trying to do what I am doing. Her new blog is here.)
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In between exchanging messages with WordPress, I helped Leo with his geometry work for a while, and then around when Arun at WordPress said he needed time to dig into my files and he would check back later, we closed the laptop and the books and headed out separately.
I took Simon to the toy store to buy a souvenir plush marmot (we declined to buy the one with a battery that made it whistle) and then to the bookstore to select three Asterix books we don’t have. (I read them aloud to him and translate as we go. Fun for both of us.) Then we went out for pizza and a salade Savoyarde, basically crisp lettuce and tomato buried in slices of hardboiled egg, lardons of bacon, and little squares of local cheese. Sort of a chef salad, really.
Meanwhile, Mark accompanied Leo to the train station, as due diligence requires of parents these days, to meet Leo’s Friend From The Internet. The Friend turned out to be exactly who he said he was, a delightfully nerdy 16yo Swiss kid with blue hair, perfect British-accented English, and a bag full of Swiss snack food for us all to try.
The crunchiest cookies I have ever had, although I described them as “glassiest” to Mark
Mark left Leo and his FFTI after he confirmed their mutual harmlessness and met us at the restaurant where he finished off our lunches and my glass of wine. We got ice cream (mine: chocolate with orange peel in) and went back to the rented house where I checked my messages and, finding none, napped on and off for the next five hours or so.
Another activity that is entirely okay on vacation, as I am slowly accepting.
(Mark had to work though. We had ti squeeze dinner in between a meeting that ended at 7 pm and a meeting that started at 9 pm. I was skeptical we could do it, but it worked. Duck!)
bearing blog 