St Gervais les Bains, France

Hiking and Eating the French Alps
Jet lagged, I was up early padding around our AirBnB in my socks.  As I filled the coffee pot with water, I stared out the kitchen window at Mt Blanc.  The sun was beginning to show, back lighting the giant in a pink glow.  The locals couldn't take this view for granted, could they?  I imagined the hike - thick forest stubbornly giving way to ice pack.  If you scrambled across the glacier to the peak, you could, in a single glance, peer down on Italy, France and Switzerland.

St Gervais les Bains is a ski town in the French Alps, part of the greater Haute Savoie region.  To call it a ski town isn't exactly fair, it's a real town with year-round residents who are more than likely outnumbered by the livestock that roam the hills.  The houses looked to be built for one thing in particular - making it through winter.  Most had steeply pitched tin roofs with wide conical chimneys, stacks of perfectly cut firewood within reach.

This was a trip that made no sense, none at all.  We traded two days of driving from and back to Paris for a single day of enjoyment.  We'd originally planned it for this past January as a ski trip with Dodo's cousin.  We'd packed and started walking to the car rental and stopped to have a coffee.  Three hours later we took a vote and decided to continue drinking coffee in Paris for the foreseeable future.  Dodo changed the reservation to October and here we were - on a ski trip without any snow.  Driving for eight hours hadn't left me in the greatest mood.  In the middle of our first night I was awakened by the sound of our front door clicking shut.  I felt for the Dodo but she wasn't there so I looked out the window.  She had her hoodie pulled tightly around her head, hands in pockets, staring into the night sky, her mouth hanging open.  You don't see stars like this in Singapore.  She burst back through the door, "It's so amazing" she said over and over, tapping me on my arm, sounding like a small child.

In the morning we drove into town, got fruit and pastries for breakfast and brought them home for our pre-hike feast.  We reviewed our options and picked a two hour hike at a ski resort called Le Bettex.

During the drive to le Bettex up a steep, winding road, we passed over the names of Tour de France heroes, both new and old, painted onto the tarmac at every hair pin.  Names like Fignon and Virenque.  From the bottom to the top, eight miles at eight percent - the final climb most recently of a stage in 2016.  We parked and walked towards the trail head, at least according to a small pamphlet we found in our AirBnB, which was written in French and included a fuzzy map lacking any useful details.

We headed off into the mist, underneath one of many ski lifts.  I didn't expect us to be able to follow the map and so I tried to memorize as many of the landmarks as I could.  The cows take over in the off season - we saw just two mountain bikers and one hiker the entire time.

If it weren't for the ski lifts I wouldn't guess this was a ski slope.  It didn't seem roomy enough.  The few slender fields that would be ski-able cut through much larger forests like lightning bolts.  A testament to the skills of those who ski here or the relatively fewer lawyers practicing tort law in France.

We hiked about 6 miles and covered a thousand feet of climbing, if that.  It was a leisurely, gentle hike compared to some others we've taken.  

The perfect warm up for a heavy mountain lunch.

After our hike we drove to Chamonix, a famed ski town at the foot of Mount Blanc.  It's much larger and more touristy than St Gervais les Bains.

The town straddles the Arve, a river that looks to be made of antifreeze - Mont Blanc's glacier in liquid form.

The most handsome parts of town cling to the banks of the Arve, the further away you go, the more modern and gaudier it becomes.

We were turned away from our first restaurant choice, we'd arrive a tad late for lunch and it was full already.

We settled in a pub near the train station and dug into some typical Haute Savoie food: Tartiflette.  Potatoes and sausage under a blanket of cream and melted cheese.

We then took a stroll around town before sitting down at a patisserie for dessert.  I tried a local favorite made with Myrtilles, a close cousin of the blueberry.

Dodo kept it "Parisian" with her order - a millefeuille of raspberry.