going home

As usual, I wake up a few minutes before my alarm. Outside, I know there are clouds over Mont Blanc, but it's too dark to really see much of anything. This photo is taken an hour later, when I am ready to close the door for good to my balcony, and my little room at the Mont Blanc hotel.

They start breakfast service at 6:30 -- for the early skiers I suppose. There are no early skiers. I am the first and only one in the dining room.

(surveying the bread product for one last time...)

I go light again. You cannot stuff yourself for travel. Savoie yogurt made with blueberries, oranges, croissant, and some new pastry that is delicious with a milky coffee that they sprinkle here  abundantly with cocoa powder. Oh and honey on the side, just because I'm nuts about honey.

I'm packed and ready to go. I check the room ten times. I don't know why I take these precautions. I have never left anything in a hotel room. 

Downstairs, I look into the living room, the bar... I only once sat in either one. What a shame! I imagine it to be a comfy place to read, to people watch, to sip one of their Savoyard aperitifs which seem always to be made with fizzy wine, and blueberry liqueur. But I never did it here. Not enough time.

I ask the desk staff how early they begin to fill up for the winter. I'd made my own reservation in September. Is that when one must decide on February travel? Yes -- he confirms what I already know. French school vacations, skiers' high season. Do older people plan vacations six months in advance? Think of all the body parts that can fail you in that amount of time! Ah well, to lead a full life, one must take risks.

My ride to the airport is here. A young woman is driving. I sit back in the car that's always large enough to accommodate skis and I lose myself in thought. She asks me if I am okay. I smile. There is a beautiful mist over the valley. The kind that begs for a walk with a camera. Maybe I make a mistake in coming to the mountains only in winter. May Alpine flowers, October fields of gold -- I never see them. Fact is, Spring and Fall are beautiful seasons where I live. It would be hard to leave then.

The question that will remain unresolved for me for a while is whether to come back to Chamonix. I loved the walks. I loved the food. I loved my little room at the Mont Blanc, with a view toward the mountains, and I loved the muscle kneading at the end of a hiking day. I'm not sure that I loved Chamonix.

On the one hand, it really stirred deep feelings of time and place. Fifty years ago, I hiked and skied with my friends in the Polish mountains. Primitive shoes attached with primitive bindings to primitive skis. Run back another 50 years, or 100 years, and I would have been skiing/hiking like this (picture from the Refuge yesterday in Montenvers):

Chamonix is full of such reminders, binding the place to a past even as it tries to imagine a future (one with probably less snow). This I find poignant and meaningful. We are all connected to our past and anxious about our future! Life isn't only about the here and now. Chamonix is also full of children (at least during French school holidays). It may be a serious winter destination for mountain people and off piste skiers, but it's also a place to bring your little ones. They're welcome everywhere.

At the same time, Chamonix feels crowded. The main drag stays packed from mid afternoon onwards. Not quite Times Square, but inching that way! They come out to eat and shop and stroll and there are just too many of them (us?). I knew that the town was not small, but still, it's unsettling to see so much humanity in a mountain destination where you seek refuge away from humanity! 

Yes, Chamonix gives you choices -- where to eat, where to walk, where to have your winter adventure. But does the visitor who comes only for a week need all that choice? Last year I was happy as a clam eating every single dinner just in my hotel. Fresh and honest! No reservations needed! That was fabulous.

And yet...The history, the mountain culture, the architecture, the Alpine agricultural presence and gastronomical evolution -- it's what I loved about this place. (That and the back kneading!)  Our own winter resorts haven't the pastures for goats, the photos of women wearing long dresses to ski 150 years ago. There's a reason why I travel so far to take these mountain walks.

I'm at the Geneva Airport in good time. The flight to Paris is flawless, the next layover -- not too long. But now it gets a little crazy. 

It's going to be one of those returns! The flight from Paris has technical issues. At least a two hour delay. Not much chance of catching my connection then to Madison. I can overnight in Paris at one of those horrible airport hotels where unhappy people stay because they've been bumped off their flights. Or I can reroute through Minneapolis. I tell the agent that I do not want my suitcase lost. He assures me that the suitcase, checked in, will follow me. The suitcase, of course does not follow me. It goes to Detroit. 

In Minneapolis, my connecting flight to Madison is delayed as well. I doubt I'll be home before midnight. Ed calls and tells me that the farmette is so iced over that you can hardly move. I'm telling you, it's going to be one of those returns.

Nonetheless, I'm so happy to going home to my beloveds, and yes, so happy to have had a week in Chamonix. Ed always says travel is pointless unless you really learn something, big time. I think I did.

And that's a very good thing.

With love...

Chamonix!

There are two things that everyone does when they come to Chamonix. First, they all take the cable car to Aiguille du Midi ("Needle at Noon"). You actually take two aerial lifts and you end up at an elevation of 3842m (12605 ft) -- the highest access point by cable car anywhere. From there you can see basically the world, and specifically -- Mt Blanc up close and personal. This I did when I was in my twenties and I never want to do it again. My head does funny things at sudden shifts in elevations (don't even ask how many nose bleeds I get in the mountains, and even in the valleys of mountains!) and the last thing I want to do is ride in a packed cable car (Covid!) to then stand at heights that trigger every instinct in me to get out and get down. Funny that I love the mountains so much given that great heights inspire in me holy terror. [I was only a little tempted to do it anyway, because you can, since 2015, take another cable car from up there to Courmayeur in Italy. I love that small town and haven't been there since I was a very young solo traveler. So -- tiny flickers of temptation, but not enough to push me to do this trip.]

The second must-do in Chamonix is to get up close to the Mer de Glace glacier. It's by far the largest glacier in France (7 km) and the ride to it is just as beautiful as the view once you get there: you take a 20 minute cog rail car (funicular) to Montenvers and from there, you ride a brief telecabine, and finally you take some 500-plus steps down, and that puts you not only face to face with the glacier but actually right inside the glacier.

This I plan to do today.

After I greet the mountains.

They will be under cloud cover later, but at daybreak, I can still see them and feel humbled. Chamonix is such a complicated and touristed place and yet, the mountains are always there to remind you that they rule here. You are just a mere passerby.

Breakfast? I finally figured out (took me a while) that I do not need a large morning meal if I'm going to eat lunch a few hours later. Yes, I know breakfast is included in my room price, but still, "free" is not an invitation to wolf down more than you can handle. So, let's get back to fruit, yogurt and a croissant. Fine, and a stick of tomme de Savoie for protein!

I'm still unnerved by the whole skiing-Russians thing but perhaps this merely shows our utter isolation back on the other side of the ocean. Hearing Russian in the U.S. merely means that you've come across a community of immigrants. Not tourists, visiting while we're exchanging missiles over the Ukraine. Europe is different. Russians have bought up real estate here, parked their boats here, and routinely have played on Europe's playgrounds. In the past, I never gave this an ounce of thought. People travel, power to them. But of course, this year, it's different. In my mind, you can't party in Europe and wage war against its member state. Maybe it's just me. Poles have a deeply ingrained belief that Russia is always on the brink of destroying borders. Today it's Ukraine -- that's miserable enough -- tomorrow it's Poland.

Alright: do an about face -- away from the breakfast room and onto the cog rail station. The train itself is not new -- it was completed in 1909, though at first it was powered by a locomotive. (It was electrified the year I was born -- 1953). I purchased a ticket online to avoid a wait (totally unnecessary as the ticket windows were without lines), then worried a little as there was a line forming to get on the first train out (at 10:05). In the end they send two little red trains, one right after the other and all those who waited got on and found a seat.

teach your children well...

We spill out at Montenvers, having climbed some 1000m up the mountain.

And immediately I walk over to get on the small telecabine that takes us down, way down to the glacier. 

the glacier

Well, this is what it did when the telecabine was constructed in 1988: you got out of the little cabin and the glacier was before you. Over the years, the glacier has melted and receded so much, that steps have had to be constructed further down to take you to it. Each year, more steps are added. From zero just a few decades ago, to 520 today. That's how fast it is melting.

From a physical stamina standpoint, that is one hefty descent, and of course, an ascent coming back. Pregnant women and seniors are warned: take it easy, take pauses. 

I smile a little at these warnings. Some fifty years ago, I would have been sure to sprint down fast, passing anyone I could. As I am nearly 70, I don't race. Though it's not the lack of stamina that holds me back, it is, of course, the knee that's supposed to be replaced this spring. But, I've given it a workout in Chamonix and it's been more or less cooperating. 

Down I go.

Those in Chamonix have long figured out that visitors love to go inside the glacier and so they have excavated caves and short tunnels for you to do just that: walk into a field of blue ice (why blue? as I understand it, water, both liquid and solid, doesn't absorb the white light of the sun in the same way that air does; the bigger the brick of ice, or the body of water, the more blue it will appear). I don't think they realized that these caves have to be dug out anew each year as the glacier recedes. 

It's quite beautiful inside a glacier. Who knew!!

I turn around and head back up those many many stairs, sometimes dragging my wounded knee, but mostly managing just fine. And I do pause to admire the sunshine trying hard to push through the hazy skies, and, too, I study the visitors -- families with small children, small groups of friends, not many seniors and no pregnant women!

And after making it up to the train station, I feel I deserve a reward. There is a sweet little gift shop. How about a wee sized Mont Blanc crystal? Maybe a magnet? My needs are small.

Teresa, my Chamonix walking companion, had suggested I eat lunch up here, at the old Refuge de Montenvers. It was built in 1880 for mountain climbers and visitors to the Mer de Glace. Granite on the outside, knotty pine on the inside -- it exudes a strong and warm protection against mountain fury. 

I booked a lunch on the veranda and I was delighted to see little wisps of sunlight coming in from all sides in the big dining space. Happy chatter abounds. The views are, of course, fabulous. 

I would have been happy with even a hiker's meal of bread and cheese, but these people put together a small menu of local favorites that is unusually good, beyond expectation. I didn't hesitate: I choose the one important Savoyard dish I hadn't had -- the tartiflette, which has potatoes with a few onions and ham bits, smothered with strips of melted Reblechon cheese from the Chamonix valley. 

I love Reblechon and used to sneak it into my suitcase way back when, because it was impossible to get it in the U.S. Now of course we are flooded with cheese choices at home and so it's silly to take anything back at all. Still, I wont forget this lunch for a long time.

Oh, and yes, I did opt for dessert: a "blueberry finger" with pieces of meringue "snow." I will always think of wild blueberries as being a very Alpine fruit.

Outside again, I see that some people just like to eat lunch on the edge!

And now it's time to go back down to Chamonix. With a bunch of skiers!

I ask them -- where the heck do you ski here? They tell me they go up to Aiguille du Midi by cable car and from there, they ski off piste to the glacier. Steep incline, varying snow conditions and 23 kilometers of skiing. Now that's nerve! I tell them they are my definition of adventurous. The young guy retorts -- oh but I am sure you are adventurous as well! My age must have lead him to think that. But am I? At home, I was taught to be cautious. That danger lurks. Much as I wanted to plunge into adventurous stuff, I couldn't. Someone always put a hand out to stop me. And eventually, my sense of adventure fizzled. Sure, one would argue that moving to a different country when you're young and have no money is adventurous. That agreeing to teach law to Japanese students in Kyoto for a month is adventurous. That moonlighting in a restaurant after your day job is adventurous. As is kayaking with Ed and hitchhiking in Sicily, and doing a bunch of naughty things that hadn't quite made it to Ocean (yet). But at a deeper level, I know I could never have skied down off piste for 26 kilometers like these young people do routinely. And yes, in snowy years some get buried in avalanches (they all had avalanche equipment, I noticed), but most don't. As Ed would say -- you're more likely to crash in a car coming up here.

So, I admire their spirit and smile at their enthusiasm. And notice their utter tiredness.

(note the sticker on his ski... Is he a cheesemaker?)

In Chamonix again I do some light shopping for the kids. Very light. So light it doesn't even count.

And then I have someone knead my back one last time and I take out my suitcase to begin the chore of packing, while outside, the clouds roll in.

Evening. It's my last dinner in Chamonix. I leave very early tomorrow (very early!), so you could say it's my last full meal, period. I chose La Maison Carrier for it. This is a sister restaurant (well, more like the poor cousin) to the only Michelin starred place in Chamonix -- Albert 1er. Both are run by I think the fourth generation of the same family and both are part of this town's luxurious hotel. All this is irrelevant. The thing is, La Maison Carrier may be a second fiddle of the bunch, but its food reputation is stellar. And its prices are in line with those of other dining establishments around town (which honestly are up there in Paris territory: my fixed price 3 course meals, service charge included, tend to be between 40 and 50 Euros here, which is currently right around $40 - $50; in Paris I often eat below that price point).

This is the only restaurant that requires me to walk to another corner of town. And it is the first and only time for me to feel the wetness of a light rain. I didn't take an umbrella -- I have a hood on my jacket, but it does make me wonder: what would have I done had it rained the whole time I was here? (Actually, I guess I know: I would have stayed in my hotel and read a lot of books!)

The restaurant is very farm-like in decor.

The food? Oh, it is very very good, but it doesn't cut through to the top three, or even four. The execution is great, the setting -- lovely, and they have a dessert table where you could help yourself to anything and everything you wanted. But the menu is otherwise (in my view) uninspired and if you want something not terribly heavy, you are stuck with lightly cured salmon for starters and a Lake Geneva fish for a main course. I order both and they are really fine, but what is missing is some excitement! 

(Salmon in a delicious lentil puree)

(Dessert? you pick your own from a round table!)

... Or is it that I am feeling the drag of having to then go back to the hotel, in the rain, and start packing? Knowing that I have to send my suitcase through, because of those creams and kid trinkets. It's just too heavy to take on the flight with me. And knowing, too, that we are having an ice storm back in Madison right now. The airport is officially closed. The weather probably wont affect my travel, but there may well be staggering delays as airlines try to catch up. 

But that's not what I was thinking about as I walked into the hotel Mont Blanc at night. I was thinking instead about how special this place is, with its 40 rooms spread over a five floors. Indeed, as I closed the door behind me in my room and faced my suitcase, there was a knock on the door. One of the staff brought a handwritten message thanking me for my stay and along with it, a beautiful bound notebook, as a small gift. They do such stuff here. Earlier, the person who was stomping on my back asked me if I liked taking pictures in Chamonix. How did she know that I took pictures here? Somehow, they know.

As usual, it's late. I don't mind being tired tomorrow. All I have to do is sit, all day long. And catch my connections. And write some words here, for you.

with love...

Chamonix!

I have two days left in the mountains of southeast France. I feel that if I had any goals for my week here, they ought to be attended to today, because tomorrow, the weather pattern in the Alps shifts. Their much needed precipitation will descend on the mountains (though not in a blizzard fashion) and, too, on those huddling in the valleys. So today is it! 

What pressure!

I feel like I have not wasted my time here thus far. Indeed, I packed a punch. Perhaps even a wallop. The days were a bit too long and I was too tired at night. Posting was an effort. If you want to tell me that I could, in the future, take a vacation from posting, I'll retort -- how little you know me! Still, each day has been full and long and memorable.

So what to do today? So many competing interests. Teresa, my local walking partner here, noted that one reason why staying in Chamonix (she wasn't born here) appealed to her many decades ago, when she made that decision, was because there is so much variety in the valley. This is true. You come to Chamonix with a book full of options! (Though I have to say, the absence of heavy snows here this year worked in my favor: I would not have been able to do half the walks I did, had there been abundant snow. Too many avalanche threats kick in. Less snow is a skier's loss, but Nina's win.) For a visitor, deciding where to go and what to do is tough. Will I be filled with regrets if I don't do the valley walk? If I don't hop over to the Swiss side of the mountain? And what about a day of not doing much -- that has its charms as well. Should I just do nothing?

I thought about all this as I looked out on the mountains this morning (my usual routine upon waking up).

And I thought about it some more at breakfast. 

I thought how yesterday was sportive. Maybe today should be restorative?

(More thinking, in a corner of the hotel's vast living room.)

I thought about how I could always come back next year. But, but, what if there's snow and the mountain trails are cut off for walkers? Would I come here anyway? You cant decide this kind of a trip at the last minute. Too, I love the hotel. I love how it's perfectly acceptable for people to walk around in the white bathrobes and slippers. And how the young staff is always smiling up at you. It's all great. But it has, along with perhaps all of Chamonix, and maybe the entire French Alps... dare I say it -- too many Russians. Here we are, about to commemorate with sadness and not a small amount of fury the start of their war, and the families and the blond trophy wives (fake blondes, every one of them) of the powerful (because who else from Russia has the means to travel right now, with frozen assets and tightened restrictions) are vacationing in the French Alps. 

It gets to you. 

So here's my day, the earliest part of it preset by segment two of my face rub, scheduled for this morning. So, I start out with a twist of the neck and a squeeze here and a pat there (the goal is to improve circulation) and now I am ready to set out. (With a bag full of creams to take home, because EU creams and cosmetics are heavily regulated whereas ours back home allow for every toxin and carcinogen on the planet to be stuffed inside. You can read about it here. The article explains how you should read the labels and not buy stuff that contains excessive amounts of like a million unpronounceable words -- a ridiculous and impossible to implement suggestion! Easier just to buy those that are made in countries that don't equate regulation with an intrusion on personal freedom.)

After all that thinking, I decide to go back down to Les Houches, this time by train, and to pick up the telecabine from there up to Prarion. I've been told by Teresa, by the Tourist Office, by everyone, that there is great walking/snowshoeing/cross country skiing up there.

I board the train. 

I love this line that goes up and down the long Chamonix-Mt Blanc valley. In the late morning it hasn't the skiers and so I settle in to do some serious people watching. Some kids traveling independently, some families, some couples, some older people moving around the valley in this very convenient, calm way.

I get off at a station a demande. Meaning it's small and it's only on request. How small is it? Take a look: there isn't much beyond a platform. No streets leading to it, just a path to follow up the hill.

You have to climb up to get to the main road (through a forest, past a farm smelling deliciously of farm animals)...

... and I note that there's a lot of ice on the path. The way they deal with ice is to sprinkle it with gravel. No salt. At all. Anywhere. Sure, you have to walk carefully. (Or you can just move around by bus and avoid this station altogether.) But it's manageable.

The telecabine is much like the other two little gondolas I used to get up mountains here: about a ten minute ride up about 1000 m (3280ft) above the valley. (To remind you -- the Chamonix-Mt Blanc valley is already 1042m above sea level. Not high, but not low either.) 

Once up on the Prarion plateau, I quickly find the itinerarie raquette -- that's what they call a snowshoe trail. Unlike the one I tried yesterday, this one is quite reasonable (and it is shared by some cross country folks, though I saw no more than one on Nordic skis the whole time I was up there). So, it still has its ascents and descents, but it is wide and well groomed. It's really a civilized winter walk on a mountain. Good exercise, splendid views, and pockets of quiet, when you are not crossing the ski runs. (Though the ski runs here are not very crowded. I don't know why. Perhaps they aren's as challenging as some of the others?) And here's the thing: because it's so safe here (you're not going to slip down the mountain and break every bone in your body, like on yesterday's snowshoe trail), and because my cleats on my shoes are so perfect for packed snow, I can not think about managing the difficult terrain and instead, I can focus on the view, the air, and on what's inside my head. Meditative walk indeed!

I do have plenty of photos from it even as I understand you are probably tired of mountain photos. Still, it's a beautiful spot on this planet of ours and I want to give it its due. So, maybe twenty pics, okay? Fine, I agree that's excessive. You probably can do with fewer than ten! Well then here are nine!

(to the valley below)

(undulating terrain of the plateau...)

(well groomed and well marked snowshoe trail!)

(another solitary walker...)

(two on snowshoes: it is not that warm!)

(in winter, this is a skiing mountain; in the summer -- it's a pasture)

(occasionally you come across ski lifts and ski trails)

(a snow-shoer, taking it in...)

(hikers taking a pause: five friends and two dogs)

I stop at the mountaintop restaurant before going down on the telecabine. Just long enough so that I can time my return and catch the 2:51 train back to Chamonix. As usual in these places, the restaurant is mostly self service. There are a ton of chairs that people arrange for themselves on the snow. Even if you are not buying anything, you're free to sit down. Eventually one will open up. 

You find it, you plop yourself down, you exhale. And you take a selfie!

A few minutes later I ride down to the Les Houches town, and then walk down some more, to my station a demande. 

(icy but manageable)

(station a demande)

The little red train arrives on time and some 15 minutes later I am in Chamonix.

I had been told I must get myself over to the Chalet 4810 Salon du The (so named because that is the height of Mt Blanc). It sits on top of a bakery (Aux Petits Gourmands) which some would argue is just as good if not better than Richards. And, it has a collection of crystals that you can admire. [Crystals in Chamonix are a big deal. Fluorite and twisted quartz are found only on the Mont Blanc massif and in the Polar Urals in Russia. Crystal exploration and trade -- for jewelry, for high end decoration -- was well documented in this valley even back in the 17th century and it became an important part of Geneva's trade at the time. There still are crystal hunters in Chamonix today. They hunt and excavate using only traditional methods. Skills are passed on from one generation to the next. So, a big deal here!]

Yes, just looking at the pastries in the window makes me want to go in.

(inside: a French family where the grandfather did 99% of the talking)

I try to be sensible: how bout starting off with what they call a salade d'hiver? It's a salad composed of beets and lots of endive and walnuts. And for dessert? I'm sorry, I just can't help myself!

And the afternoon sun sets and soon we have a winter evening take hold. Cool and crisp.

I eat dinner at Chez Constant. They pride themselves in their use of French and when possible, local products and I am happy to see that this puts a lot of mushrooms on the menu. Again, I find the fixed price meal to be a real deal. What do I get? Well, I start off with scallops (they are from Normandy; it was either that or their foie gras and two days in a row of foie gras is too much) which are with chanterelles, and then go onto local trout over winter root vegetables and, again, with chanterelles. Dessert is part of the deal and the waiter convinces me that a molten cake with raspberry ice cream is tres petit. It's not. I can't finish it. And no, you do not get a photo of the dessert. I'll post one of the trout because it is so classically French and so perfectly prepared. Underneath that skin is a delicate pink meat that falls off the fork. Sublime.

I'm always surprised to see every menu here have cheese fondue on it, and even more surprised to see so many people ordering it. Boiled potatoes, cut up baguette and a pot of cheese. To be sure, the cheese is probably greatly enhanced with wine, possibly garlic. But it is just melted cheese. No better no worse here at Chez Constant than in most other restaurants in Chamonix. And honestly, it's not really a Savoyard dish. Cheese fondue is properly Swiss. But, images of Alpine foods run deep and I suppose when you vacation in the Alps, you want whatever you feel is that quintessential Alpine food. I'm not totally immune: I often pick up a tomme de Savoie chunk of cheese for breakfast. Me, who never ever eats cheese for breakfast back home.

Sleep well all you mountain lovers and city dwellers and ocean people everywhere!

With love...