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].
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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?
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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?
+ + +
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.
+ + +
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!
+ + +
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.)
+ + +
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.)
+ + +
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!)
We had a plan for Monday that involved going up in the Aiguille de Midi gondola to the mid-station. We were in the act of gathering gear and putting on warm clothes, packing backpacks and locating granola bars, when we received information from the top: Not today. Too windy and cloudy up there. They may close the lift.
So. Need to pivot.
I conferred with Mark and we elected to make it a work day instead of a fun day. A certain number of our days here must be work days; Mark doesn’t quite have enough vacation otherwise, at least if we want to travel to be with family at Christmas. So there’s a lot of sense in working when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
However, this is a little sad for the kids. They were expecting a day on the mountain, and instead they must do math and other schoolwork. Literally already have their hats and hiking boots on: Sorry kids, not today. It isn’t safe enough in the weather.
This is a lesson you must learn, though, if you value life and limb, and you want to do any sort of weather-dependent activity that has objective hazards. It could be skiing, ski touring, climbing, and backcountry camping. Or it could be any sort of boating, or hiking at altitude, or road cycling. You must learn to let go of your plan when conditions change.
A lot of metaphors out here under the sky.
One of the glaciers visible from town. None of them are as large as they once were.
Pivoting from one outdoor activity to another can be hard enough. Mark and I did briefly discuss substituting a pretty, low-altitude hike. But pivoting from fun day to school day was pretty hard, even though everyone knows it frees up another day later, maybe one with better weather.
So there was a little more frustration than usual. Things seemed harder to do. One of the kids got through only about half of a day’s work before it was clear he was done. Anyway, we broke for lunch after that and tried to find a good restaurant that also had a cheeseburger and fries.
There’s a place that brews their own mead and has smashburgers and really good, American crispy tavern-style fries. I had mead called “le sang du Viking” and a tarte flambé “la végétarienne.”
Not much to report for the afternoon. Some work, some shopping, a meal of snacks and leftovers. Mark had to take a meeting till 7 pm and another at 10:30 pm, but that was long enough for a pleasant dinner and a bottle of wine. No complaints. Hope for better weather Wednesday.
Simon had a rougher time sitting with us at Mass in Saint-Michel, the little, highly decorated church in Chamonix, than he did last time. I’d asked him to pack some books for him to look at in Mass—at eleven, and a fairly voracious reader, he still relies on “church books” not to get restless. His current favorite is a beautifully illustrated stories of the saints. But he was worried about losing it and didn’t bring it, and now he is paying the price of having nothing in English to look at (or hear) but the MagnifiKid children’s missalettes I brought. Which don’t last very long.
So by the end of the 95-minute service Mark had taken him outside for some fresh air on the church steps. Even I ducked out ahead of the dismissal, because after Mass the parish was about to have a party to say goodbye to their pastor who was leaving, and a minute or two into the “announcements that precede the final blessing and dismissal” it became clear that it was really a long speech from the deacon reviewing the pastor’s good works and thanking him for his service.
If it had been just me I’d totally have stayed for the party. They had tables set up outside the front door waiting for people to pass by and pick up their treats. Only imstead of a coffee urn and a sheet cake it was wine and cheese. And after the wine and cheese on the steps they were going to have a full lunch in a different location in the parish.
I would like to tell this priest that I appreciate him. I’ve been to this town om Sundays a few times in the last 11 years, and he speaks slowly and clearly with lots of pauses. He doesn’t have the other thing that makes a homily easy to follow, a highly organized structure, but he constantly makes references to phrases from the readings, which help me keep my mental place. Anyway.
+ + +
Leo had the idea that somewhere in the Chamonix Valley there would be at least one operation selling bungee jumping, on the theory that the target audience for such a thing (people who climb, ski, mountain bike, and fly on parachute wings down from the mountain) is already here.
He was right of course, and found such an operation in nearby Saint-Gervais. Here’s the link, scroll down to see the jump team making “WE’RE GONNA GIVE YOU AN AWESOME TIME, LOTS OF SENSATIONS, IT’LL BE CRAZY” faces.
High season’s over so the only day they were taking clients during our trip was Sunday. Accordingly, a few days ago I went online and reserved a nonrefundable spot for him. He was assigned a place in the 4 pm cohort. Mark promised to drive him and deal with the staff without me having to be involved.
Mark would probably have jumped too if he could. (“But your joints,” I said.) Malheureusement for Mark (heureusement for his joints) they make you sign a paper saying you have none of the health conditions on a long list, including vision correction with a diopter ≥ 5.
The eyes have it. Mark can only watch.
I trust that Mark, not me, is the best person to send along to evaluate where the operation falls on the “professional–sketchy” spectrum. We discussed the conditions for “turning back” without a thought about losing the deposit: if Leo changed his mind and didn’t jump, or if Mark didn’t feel right about the setup and decided not to let him, or if the weather changed. This is a type of conversation we have had many times over the course of our marriage—obligatory, I think, when one of you (or both, I suppose) likes to hurl himself or herself down mountains, disappear into the wildfire-prone backcountry, etc.
I stayed in the apartment and made soup in the very-well-appointed kitchen.
Mark texted me pictures:
(“Good to know,” I replied.)
And eventually:
I probably won’t post the video of my minor child here, but I’ll describe it. It’s from far away on the viewing platform and on maximum iPhone zoom. Leo’s wearing a pale green top and has his voluminous long hair pulled back. He stands at the edge looking over; a jump team member holds the bungee slack so its weight isn’t hanging from Leo. You see him shake out his arms, a classic psyching-up move. Then you can hear an English “Three, two, one!” and the gentleman places a hand on his back and Leo sort of…rolls forward off the bridge.
He falls shoulder-blades first and disappears behind the trees. You can see the twin cords only. A full six seconds pass before the cords begin to recoil. And then he comes flying up, upside down, looking rather rag-doll-ish.
The audio features a French woman who was standing next to Mark on the viewing platform. She gasps, and says something I can’t make out. I can imagine though. Other people shriek and laugh nervously, again when he boings back into view.
I should have taught Mark how to say: That’s my boy! before he went.
+ + +
As for me, I bravely made soup:
And with the help of Google Translate and an onlinr manual in German, I figured out how to run the dishwasher on quick wash even though the dishwasher has a messed-up display and only speaks Turkish:
When Mark got back from taking our som bungee jumping and I showed him how I figured out how to operate the dishwasher, he said, essentially, “Thank goodness I have you to do this, because I could never.”
Indeed, it is nice to get to work together. Creating this CRAZY ambience! And also chicken soup.
After lunch we came around past Turin on the bypass and west toward the long Fréjus tunnel. Signs warned us that there was a backup leading up to the tunnel, which is something you just have to expect; maybe even more with Mont Blanc’s tunnel closed. It seemed to us that some sort of accident had caused the backup, because at one point an ambulance came up from behind. But even after an obstruction is cleared, it takes time to get the backup through, since cars have to go at a reduced speed and at wide intervals.
I think we sat in the traffic jam for… hm, ninety minutes? Sixty? Simon got impatient but I felt positive. Once we got to the tollbooth it was smooth sailing.
Out of it again, though, and it was mountain driving. I am permitted to drive the car here, we paid for the supplemental driver, but I think neither Mark nor I wanted me driving it in the mountains. I hate mountain driving even in good weather and in my own car, let alone this behemoth in the rain. Mark drove, and I was confident in his abilities on the well-maintained and just-wide-enough twisty roads through the gorges, but I heard some alarmed mutterings and a couple of “Yikes!” from the driver’s seat.
The gorges were, uh, gorgeous but very twisty, and Simon was carsick into a sturdy plastic grocery bag we had given him just in case. We complemented him on his fortitude and presence of mind, and drove on. Leo helped him find something to clean his face with. Part of a cardboard box, I think. Eventually we emerged into a town still decorated with flags from, I think, when the Tour de France came through.
That’s most of the remaining adventure from yesterday, I think. More adventure later today, and also some tomorrow; then perhaps work.
We have stuffed all our things into the back of the rental car, an enormous (to us) Volvo SUV that Mark is not enjoying driving, and made our way a few hours inland, from that charming just-big-enough walkup over the top of an office with a temp agency and a one-person tutoring center, to the ground floor plus walkout basement of a really charming house.
The house is so cozy but with plenty of room that it really makes me miss my college-age and grown kids. It has three bedrooms, two with double beds and one with a set of bunks, and we totally could have fit all seven of us once upon a time when children shared beds if we told them to and/or would have been happy to soend all their time on this sprawling sofa in TV room.
So far the only downside I have discovered is that there is no drip coffee maker, and so this morning I will need to go through at least six Nespresso pods all by myself.
I did find a battered French press in the cabinet, but I am skeptical as I have only the finely ground coffee that is the norm around here.
+ + +
I had laid out three different plans for the drive back, to be selected from as conditions permitted. The first we later found out would never have beem possible, because the tunnel under Mont Blanc is temporarily closed all this autumn. The second, which we used, took us along the coast into Italy, then across Piedmont to just outside Turin, then west under the Alps back to France via a different, 13-km-long tunnel called Fréjus, followed by some driving through mountain gorges. The third option was tunnel-free in just France, ended the same as the second route, but would be 90 min longer than the tunnel routes if they were to go smoothly.
I think maybe the best reason for the second one is so we could have lunch in Italy. Especially since with Mont Blanc tunnel closed, we can’t get back and forth easily to have lunch in Italy again. And even if lunch in Italy is just at a gas station grill.
Gas station sandwiches
Mark and Leo went through the cafeteria style line and got lasagna and “patatine steakhouse” while Simon and I went to the panini station. Simon, who is learning Italian as his homeschool language, told the busy man behind the counter, “Voglio un trancio di pizza,” and was perfectly understood.
(I told Mark proudly later, and he went: “Trancio! Oh, a tranche! A slice!” Indeed! Cognates are cool.)
Anyway, the man cut a generous portion of pizza from the case, enclosed it in a parchment-type paper, and set it to heating in the panini press. Then he went back to taking other orders. I wasn’t quick enough with mine, and a handful of coffee drinkers got theirs in first. I watched as he set a batch of saucers and spoons on the bar then turned to make the corresponding number of espressos, then set them up, then turned back to me and I asked for a panino frescotto from the case. He nodded and then went to fetch Simon’s pizza out of the panini press, put my sandwich in, cut the pizza in two and put it on a ceramic plate next to the lemon Fanta Simon had chosen from the fridges.
Leo and Mark were at the far other end at the restaurant tables, and people around me were eating standing at the bar. I asked the man, “Può pagare qui e mangiare allì?”while gesturing vaguely at the restaurant, and he spoke to me and I understood that the answer was yes, and in fact I could proceed to the cash register around the corner where I hadn’t noticed it, while my panino heated. I sent Simon with his plate and drink over to find Mark and went around to the cash register, where somehow, a cheerful “Scusi, signore, non so il sistema,” came out of my mouth as I presented my credit card. Even though I think maybe the right verb should have been conosco. Anyway, he answered me at length and at least part of that was something like, it’s not that hard, don’t worry about it, the only system here is that you give me money and I give you food and coffee.
I have not been studying Italian nearly as long as French, and I love the French language, but there’s something about Italian that makes it a lot more… relaxed, easy, and fun. Less energy pushing the breath out through the linguistic works. Less stress about getting it exactly right. And understanding it… I am pretty good at French aural comprehension, but Italian sometimes feels weirdly like I have a Babel fish in my ear. I couldn’t tell you word for word what was said but I get the important bits.
My sandwich was good. A boiled ham with a thick crème fraiche and an arugula pesto. Simon loved his pizza. While Mark was putting gas in the car I went back to the bar for an espresso, drank it standing up, paid in coins and went on my way. Arrivederci.
Mark, Simon, and I took the train back to Nice this morning, just to pick up a rental car.
The rental counter was easy, and we were helped by a friendly staffer named Jean-Félix (I introduced Simon, whose middle name is Felix, so they had something in common). We need a big SUV because we have rather a lot of baggage, and one thing about European cars is they don’t often have a lot of trunk space. Back when we traveled with all seven of us, we had to get a nine-seater van.
Our first challenge was getting it out of the rental company garage. You know those tight spiral ramps? I was frankly amazed someone got it in.
So Mark carefully maneuvered it into the helix and drove excruciatingly slowly down to the next level to the sound of one beep-beep-beep warning us that the right passenger door was about to scrape the inside wall and another beep-beep-beep warning is that the left headlight was about to scrape the outside wall. Mark threaded that needle all the way down. Whew! Time to drive in the center of Nice, France’s fifth-largest city!
We made it out with only one wrong turn and got on the A8 back to Menton. That part wasn’t hard at all. Highway driving is not much different from at home, and after 12 days here we knew how to get to the garage we were aiming for.
+ + +
After finishing up at the rental counter but before fetching the car, we needed to get lunch. Originally we planned to do a little sightseeing in town, but Simon was hungry now so we just went to the first open pizza-and-panini shop we found.
We ordered a pizza for Simon and paninis for us, and while Mark did phone searches to try to confirm that our rental SUV would not exceed the 1.8-meter height limit of our parking garage, I studied the placemat menu to learn about the types of pizza available here. Many were familiar from Menton or other places, but a few were novel. I posted a pic straight to IG.
If I had noticed the Alessandra I might have wanted that. Bacon, goat cheese, potatoes, onions? On a pizza? Yes please.
Instead I got a wonderfully garlic-buttered tuna tomato panini.
Anyway we decided not to sightsee and just fetched the car after that.
+ + +
We got it parked in a great spot in the garage—end of a row corner, nothing behind or in front—and over the course of the evening Mark got several suitcases into it, rolled in ones and twos across the street and down the block.
Then we went out for one last drink at a seaside bar, and listened to the roar of the waves. I looked out over the sand, lit by the spillover lights from the patios, and watched the waves break once, twice, three times, reaching foamy fingers into the air. I thought about them breaking like that over and over for hundreds of years, polishing the stones, dragging them out, tossing them up again. And here we were to watch only a few rounds then turn away.
Mark likes to tell a story from a trip to Rome he took without me, where some local he made English small-talk with warned him that he needed to stay away from “the dangerous parts of Rome.” Mark inquired what parts did he mean, and the gentleman leaned in and said, “You see, there are places here where you will pay too much for not very good food .”
I’ll just say, here in Menton we have had no dangerous experiences at all.
Most meals cost less than it would cost us to go out in our home city, and that is even if you correct for the differences regarding tax and tip and even with us drinking more alcohol (since neither has to drive) than we would at home.
Ice cream costs less. Wine costs less. Sodas for the kids maybe cost a little more. Groceries seem to cost less.
And we’ve now eaten at lots of different places, including some you might expect to be dangerous. Bistros right on the sea. Brasseries in sight of the very-photogenic stairs leading up to the basilica. Snack bars, kebab shops, pizzerias, sushi even. It’s all great.
Well, the sushi was about as good as good American sushi, so nothing mind-blowing, just familiar and yummy. And last night Mark had some swordfish that he thought was just okay, but that might just be that he isn’t as into swordfish as he thought.
Anyway. Just another nice and pleasant note.
Today we’re off to Nice early to fetch our rental car, so I have to keep this one short.
bearing blog 