First Hiking Day

Monday, July 14th - Today was our first hiking day we got up at 6:30 put down our tents and had breakfast. For lunch we made ourselves some sandwiches I made myself a nutella-peanut butter sandwich and a piece of bread with butter some ham and some cucumbers. I also grab some fruit so that I could eat throughout the day. We started off walking. We did a lot of walking today 14 or so kilometers a lot of it was uphill some of it was downhill but it was beautiful views all around.

 After breakfast we started walking to the bus stop as we were going to take a ride down to Chamonix to get to Panpraz to go up the mountain in a cable car to start our walk. Once up top off we went. The views are absolutely beautiful. I don’t think it’s anything comparable to Peru though. We have beautiful views of the mountains beautiful views of glaciers the city down below it is absolutely beautiful.

 When we stopped for lunch it was quite cold and windy.  We stayed here for about 30 minutes.  Once we got going again one of our walkers found that she had a hard time walking her knee was in quite a bit of pain. I believed it was her IT band as I have lived through it before and she was describing the exact same pain I’ve had. So instead of coming with us, Remi offered to accompany her down through a different shorter and more direct route.  Since he speaks French he would be able to get the information required to get back on track if they got lost.

The rest of the group continued going up.  We saw a beautiful waterfall, a couple of ibex. We got a few pictures of them and off we went. At this point we were descending a mountain. The trails today were very technical lots of rocks and things to trip on. We finally made it our way made our way down the mountain to little village called Argentière.  This is where we met up with Rémi and Beth.  People had beer and we made our way to the campground which was about another 20 to 30 minutes
away.

We had dinner here tonight.  What an odd dinner for campers... a mix of potato salad, some sort of coleslaw and beets. After the salad we were served mussels and french fries.  Let's say I let the dinner table still hungry as I don't eat any of those things. For dessert we had some watermelon which taste like absolutely nothing. Hopefully the food tomorrow will be a little bit better as I’m going to need more food for all the energy that I’m spending climbing mountains and descending them.  Well that’s it for now I am off to bed as I am very tired...we’ll see what tomorrow brings!