Day 1: Les Houches to Les Contamines (July 19)
16.7 km, 826.7 m ascent, 1,403.6 m descent
Today we began our daily morning routine: breakfast at the hotel followed by quickly packing our suitcases so they’d be ready for pickup by the luggage transfer guys by 8:30. This system works extraordinarily well, and we’ve never had a problem with transfers anywhere in the Alps.
The classic TMB route starts in Les Houches, a town just south of Chamonix. We took a bus from Chamonix to the Bellevue stop in Les Houches. This took longer than we’d intended because the first bus we took was heading north toward Argentiére, not south toward Les Houches – a typical jet lag mistake. In any case, it gave us the opportunity to make a dinner reservation at the wonderful restaurant Beurre Noisette for our return the following week and also to buy a bottle of (expensive!) sunscreen in a pharmacy.
Jet lag never does good things to our basic intelligence. We got off the cablecar and immediately headed in exactly the wrong direction for 15 minutes. We then got to spend another 15 minutes retracing our steps to where we’d started.
Eventually our circadian rhythms kicked into daytime mode and we became less stupid. That was good, because this was a beautiful day of hiking!
The mother of the family renting this beast expressed some scorn that we’d never heard of such a business arrangement; EVERYONE rents donkeys and mules, she said.
