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Published: September 18th 2007
Greetings from rainy Chamonix!
We completed the tour yesterday and used our rain gear for the first time....for only about 10 minutes. We can not believe our good fortune....it is cool now, rainy and cloudy and as we look up, can not even see Brevent....2500 m above us were we stood yesterday. It was a long final day....over 9 hours and 2000m down. I think we are in shock a bit that we completed it and that everything went so well. We slept well last night and were at a loss this morning as there was no trail ahead of us! As neither of us are shoppers we tired of that and headed off to the pool. We had a great time on the water slide....seems like we crave the exercise haha! We got quite the looks from other people as our farmer's tans are very prominant. We look great from the top of our ankle to half way up our thighs!
We have run into a few of our friends we made along the way in town. It is always nice to see a familiar face. We have met people from Norway, Australia, Britain, Israel, US, Canada, Ireland and of course France, Italy and Switzerland. In general we hiked alone but it is nice to sit down to dinner with people who also saw the sights of the day. Because we are not the fastest of hikers (walkers as they call it here) we often arrived to smiling faces, a beer on the table, and cheers for the crazy Canadians. Even though we were not the fastest we were the only ones that we know of to do all of the difficult alternate routes and not use any buses/trains/cable cars and we are pretty proud that we walked the entire way. What we thought was a walk around a mountain turned to a walk around a mountain range. It is amazing where your feet can take you.
There was one part of the trail that excited Alicia and made Kelley push out of her comfort level. We had to climb up the side of a rock face on ladders, platforms and small metal foot spaces. We had railings, kind of, to hang on to most of the way. Alicia- I guess since I spent my summer climbing ladders while painting houses, the thought of climbing them up a mountain sounded like fun. With thirty pounds on my back was a little different however. Mom did really well and really focused on one step at a time. There are pictures we will send when we get to a place that will allow us to import photos. The good news is that we transferred all 700+ pictures to a DVD today so they are safely off our cameras.
We are off to Martigny Switzerland tomorrow to see a friend's son who is playing volleyball there. We were excited to take the train as it is supposed to be a very scenic route. However the train is not running (kind of like our planes that weren't working) so we get to take the bus. Hopefully it works and the clouds lift out of the valleys so we can see the mountains from below rather than above.
It is a weird feeling to not walk for hours in a day and we feel quite light without our packs and big boots. We even smell pretty due to our laundry adventure this morning. Lets be honest everything smells pretty accept for my feet (alicia). It is a great life this travelling buisness, our biggest priority today was eating, and due to our amount of excercising in the last little while, it is all guilt free!!!!!!
We have posted this without pictures and we will add whenever we can. Just wanted you all to know that we are safe, happy, and completed the tour de Mont Blanc.
Thanks for the comments, miss you all, love,
Kelley and Alicia
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Mitch
non-member comment
Congrats!! Way to go girls! Miss you over here!!! Have some beers for me!