Chamonix, Mont Blanc - Day One

June 14, 2012

After our tiring day yesterday, it was difficult to get the kids out of bed in the morning.  I finally got them to get up with promises of the fabulous breakfast awaiting them downstairs.  We were served delicious drinks again with artwork on top and I remembered my camera this time…

Then it was off for a four hour drive to Chamonix - Mont Blanc, France.  It was pretty flat most of the way as we made our way west through Italy.  Turning north, we headed toward the mountains and Mt. Blanc.

It was really nice getting into the mountains again.  Every hillside was different…

Finally, our first view of Mont Blanc…

We drove through the Mont Blanc Tunnel which is 11 kilometers long.  For safety, you are supposed to keep two blue-light's distance away from the vehicle in front (can you see any second blue light before the truck??).  We overheard Jason tell Danika, “The thing about tunnels is, they ruin the view.”  So true!

When we exited the tunnel, we were in France and this was our first view of Mont Blanc from the French side.

We drove into Chamonix around 2:00 p.m. It is a really cute little town.

We found out that we couldn’t check into our lodging until 5:00 p.m.  So we walked around town for a while…

We found this cute little church.  We will go up to the peak you see behind it in two days time, and hike across just below the snowline…

This is the view from the front of the church looking at the mountains opposite.  Mont Blanc not in this picture as it is off to the far right.

And this is looking at Mont Blanc from town…

Then we decided to have a bite to eat while we waited for our room.  Check out the views we had while we ate… awesome J  David found out that he has been very successful in surpressing his French language skills.  When we first came to France from England, David did a great job with his French.  As we moved into Italy, he kept speaking in French rather than Italian.  He made a really concerted effort to stop any references at all to French (including stopping Danika saying "voila" when she did something) so he could get his brain to work in Italian.  It took a full month, but it worked really well...and now it won't stop working in Italian.  This is a problem here in France, although our waitress here was pretty good with Italian, so we did most of the ordering in Italian, with the odd word of French thrown in...FrItalian.

We stumbled upon all sorts of cool little things while we explored…

We finally checked in and got unpacked.  We lucked out with a free parking space right out front too J  The place is an apartment, and is a cute little place with bunk beds for the kids, and a little kitchenette.  It also has a balcony with a view of the same peak as behind the church.   I must have been too tired to take pictures.  After settling in, we did more exploring of the town and went to the tourist information to get maps and make a plan of action for the next two days. 

After putting the kids to bed, David and I sat on the balcony relaxing.  This is the view around 11:00 p.m.

Off to bed for me…

~Mary