In Typical French Fashion…

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Tour du Mont Blanc – Day 1

Les Houches, France to Refuge de Nant Borrant

Starting elevation: 1,008 m

Ending elevation: 1,459 m

Elevation gain: 692 m

Elevation loss: 1,051 m

Distance: 11.9 miles

Today we woke up with the alarm at 6 am. We were both awake just a little in the night, and I was glad I set the alarm, because at 6 am we were both sleeping hard.

We sitz-bath showered in our shower that only an 8-year-old could have stood upright in, and quickly got ready. The plan was to meet both Ed & Maggie and Pat & Andrew at 7:30 for breakfast in the hotel.

Morning view from our 5th-floor room in Les Houches

The breakfast spread was quite generous, with juices, coffees, eggs, cereal, yogurt, fruit, and croissants. Pat and Andrew surprised us with matching TMB quick dry shirts for the four of us, with the Maltese and American flags on them, so of course, after breakfast, we quickly changed into them so that we could commemorate the experience at the start of the TMB arch all dolled up together.

We captured the obligatory photos at the arch and grabbed the Bellvue cable car up to the top. From here, we said au revoir to Ed and Maggie and started off on the TMB…in the wrong direction. Whoops. The trail is well marked, but we learned our lesson about knowing the name of the next major place on our route and also to look at our map app. Oh well, we got back on track without the need for backtracking, so it all worked out.

We left Les Houches without grabbing anything for lunch because we were to pass by many towns and villages on this first day. But in typical French fashion, there were no markets or restaurants to be found in any of the villages. Ok, two lessons learned early on. Always buy the sack lunch from the refuge. Done.

We managed to get to a large enough town with grocery stores and restaurants and lo and behold, not a single restaurant would serve any food to us at 2:30 pm. Normalment.

We ended up buying cheese, baguette, and meat from the grocery and making a delicious French sandwich and using our newly cleaned Leatherman to cut it all.

After our late lunch, we still had 3.9 miles or so to go, so we kept after it.

The path after lunch was much busier but much less rugged and steep. We saw 3(!) Shiba Inus being walked, one of whom was only 3 months old. So cute. I tried to talk to the owner and he chastised me for not speaking French…in France. Again, normalment.

We stopped for a little snack of ice cream and fresh lemonade at Notre Dame de la Gorge and prepped for the short but steep uphill trek to Refuge de Nant Borrant.