Day 6: Paris

Ten hours of sleep, a single home base for the next four days, and a careful regiment of “sweating it out” was all it took to beat the 24-hour bug and get me back on my feet. Our midnight arrival didn’t leave much time to marvel at our surroundings but our first full day in Paris had us fueling up with pistachio tartines for breakfast before going into full tourist mode.

One of our first stops was the Conciergerie, a former 6th century royal residence on the Ile de la Cité. By the 14th century, however, the function of the Conciergerie had changed from a symbol of royal power to a Palace of Justice. Part of the palace was converted into prison cells, and during the French Revolution, became a ruinous place of detention for “enemies of the republic” where, among others, Marie Antoinette was famously imprisoned for 76 days before being tried.

Prior to the visit, I knew next to nothing about Marie Antoinette save for her likely misattributed decree to “let them eat cake.” But in 1793, there were people who both loved and hated her to such extremes that she underwent 24-hour surveillance after a failed attempt to free her – but was also eventually sentenced to death. In 1815, Louis XVIII ordered the conversion of her former prison cell into a chapel and now, at the Conciergerie gift shop, there are prints of the former queen on everything from throw pillows to mugs to embroidered tapestries. So, did the justice system get it right? Did the price – execution by guillotine – fit the crime? And what confidence does it instill in criminal sentencing today in the modern-day system on which it’s based?

By dinner, we were miraculously ahead of schedule. Courtney ushered me underground to what she predicted would be the highlight of my day: the Paris Metro. And she was right. There was no shortage of things to admire: the trains are frequent, punctual, and clean. Announcements are spoken in multiple languages. And the seats are turned inward, fostering empathy and, daresay, connection between strangers. It trounced the New York City subway in nearly every respect.

Clear signage and the availability of ticket machines, however, were not its strong suit. Instead of heading east toward the Arc de Triomphe as we’d hoped, we hopped on the train due north, out of the city center. By the time we realized our error, we were firmly planted in Paris’s Zone 2, unable to both transfer to the inward-bound train or exit the station because of a discrepancy in ticket type. Now certain to miss the sunset and stuck in a Dante-esque purgatory, I did what I’d learned from my straphanger youth. When no one was looking, I jumped the turnstile.

I knew then as well as I do now that things will always go wrong, but it never hurts to know how to hustle. Still, the stakes were different; I was in a different country with, admittedly, different and likely inscrutable laws. How transgressive was not paying the Metro fare? And what were the repercussions – arcane and provincial as they might be – if I was caught?

On the station platform back into the city, I saw a man pressing the coin return button on a vending machine. From it came a cascade of coins, which he quickly shoved into his pocket. With his other hand, he held a bobby pin, its one end straightened like a tool for picking locks. I looked in his direction and we locked eyes for a moment before he gave me a knowing nod. Had he seen me jump? Would he vouch for me if I was to face trial? The train swiftly pulled into the station. Much as I admired the man’s hustle, I made sure to keep my distance on the ride back.

Day 5: Geneva

At this point in the trip, I’d begun to get used to the staples of French breakfast. Bread (in the form of baguette, toast, or croissant), milk (dairy, full fat), corn flakes (or cocoa puffs), soft cheese (whose virtues are lost on me), and coffee (which I don’t drink). Carb city, and nary a protein in sight. And so, it was a rude awakening to find that our first Italian breakfast was, in fact, more of the same (Courtney, for the record, had no such qualms).

If I sound salty, it’s because I was getting sick – sore throat, runny nose, pounding stuffiness in my ears. Evidently, the last few weeks were catching up with me. And unfortunately, we were in for a long travel day. There were only two ways back to Chamonix, where we started the Tour four days ago – hiking another six days to complete the circuit or cutting through the middle by taking a cable car over the top of Mont Blanc. We chose the latter.

Little did I know, however, that the cable car option entailed no less than six separate transfers: two on the Italian side, one spanning the length of Géant Glacier – home to the highest peaks in the French Alps – and three more once we were in France. The longest was the 45-minute stretch over Géant Glacier, with only two pylons holding up the steel infrastructure; by all accounts, a remarkable feat of engineering. And the views were remarkable, too. I felt like I’d been airlifted directly into an alpine vista, complete with snow, icy rock cliffs, and glistening mountain passes.

But the whole time, my head was like a hot air balloon, floating above the rest of my body. Each trip on the cable car felt like taking off and landing in a jet; my ears felt like they had a thousand pounds of pressure on them waiting to burst through. The midway station at Pointe Helbronner was so remote it could have passed for a research center on Mars or the villain hideout in a Bond movie. Outside, there was a ticket counter to an arctic garden right beside people sunbathing in beach chairs. Was I dreaming? Courtney ordered me a chicken sandwich from the Skyway Café.

“You should eat something,” Courtney said. And then, staring into my still-vacant eyes: “You don’t know how to be sick.”

I very rarely get sick; when I do, it’s usually for no more than 24 hours. As a result, I’m basically clueless on all matters self-care. The sandwich was perhaps the blandest thing I’d ever tasted, but it was enough to bring me back to Earth. When I looked out over the glacier, I saw more feats of superhuman ability: alpinists gamely bounding over crevasses, rock climbers dangling from sheer cliffsides. People were doing truly incredible things; meanwhile, all I could seem to muster the energy for was keeping myself alert enough to stand upright on a cable car.

We eventually made it back to Chamonix, caught a bus to Geneva, and took the Metro to the train station, where it would still be another four-hour train to Paris. In our one-hour dinner window, Courtney suggested something spicy for my cold. In a city not well-known for its cuisine, it was no small achievement for her to find a Sichuan restaurant, just minutes from the train station. When we walked in, the owner – a middle-aged man from Fujian – said something in French that I didn’t understand. I asked, in Mandarin, if we could sit on the patio outside and if he could make us the spiciest dish on the menu. He nodded and led us to our seats. It was nice to feel like there was something I still knew how to do.

Day 4: Courmayeur

On our third and final day of hiking, we decided to cut our losses. Courtney woke up with so much neck pain she could barely turn her head and I had a bad limp in my Achilles tendon. The night before, at Refuge des Mottets (a converted dairy barn), we all sat at long tables for dinner, making conversation with fellow hikers from around the world – Sweden, Israel, Japan. The sisters who owned the refuge fed sheet music into an old music box, cranking sing-along tunes that celebrated our shared diversity—culminating, naturally, with John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

We decided to cap our day at an “easy” ten miles – hiking up to Col de la Seigne, at the border with Italy, before continuing north, and stopping at La Villaise to take a bus that would bring us to Courmayeur. The sun cast a perfect shadow across the cavalcade of mountains, and we marveled at the valley of braiding streams as we entered—like smugglers, customs-less and passport-free—into Italy. It was true what our new friends had said over dinner: the only difference when we crossed the border was that passing strangers said “Bonjourno” instead of “Bonjour.” It felt weird and somewhat anticlimactic to be finishing the hike early. Still, we were proud of ourselves: 35 miles over three days in the Alps was nothing to scoff at.

In Courmayeur, we stayed at a little bed-and-breakfast run by an older Italian woman who we communicated with in Courtney’s high school French. We hadn’t reserved ahead since we didn’t plan to stay in town, but we got lucky – most of the hotels we passed were already booked up. It was a room out of an old storybook—ornate wardrobe, sink and wash basin in the room, shared bathroom with a pull-string shower cord. Outside were wooden shutters and a wrap-around balcony; we could almost see Belle walking by on the street below us, her face buried in a book.

From our balcony, we had a great view of the gelateria, where we celebrated our achievements with a double hazelnut scoop. But we could also see the finish line to the Tor des Géants, widely touted as the world’s toughest endurance trail race. Courmayeur was Tor-crazy – hotels were booked with competitors (and, in some cases, their families), local suppliers were hawking ultra gear, and nearly every shop we passed had a sign out front inviting trail-weary finishers in for a drink or a bite to eat.  

We just so happened to be in town for the final days of the tenth annual race, which drew nearly 2,000 athletes from 80 countries. Competitors were tasked with a feat of athleticism so herculean as to appear inconceivable: 200 miles of running and over 78,000 feet of elevation gain over six days (though the winners finished in less than three). It made our backpacking in the Alps feel like, well, a jaunty stroll by comparison.

Every fifteen minutes or so, we could see another competitor cross the finish line, their hiking poles held as high as their spirits. Pretty soon, we didn’t have to look when we heard the sound of claps and whistles to know that someone was being overcome by an enormous sense of accomplishment. It was like a soundtrack that punctuated every moment of our day in Italy – ambling down alleyways, eating risotto dinner, recovering with cat-cow stretches on the porch. It didn’t let up even as dusk fell. And yet, I still liked to believe that in the quiet of the night, as Courtney and I lay down in bed – dreaming of our first day of non-hiking – that they were also cheering for us.

Day 3: Refuge des Mottets

There was a sign accompanying the breakfast spread at our refuge: made locally. Milk, yogurt, cheese, even the butter. I marveled at our good luck. But I began to wonder—marooned in the French countryside and miles from the nearest service road—where did all this food come from?

There’s nothing like a fifteen-mile day of hiking to make you question everything. Not least of which, the poor choices you made when packing for a backpacking trip. Laptop, digital camera, portable speaker, pajamas, (multiple) books for leisure reading. I estimated that my pack – though I never had the good sense to weigh it in Seattle – was close to fifty pounds. Did we really need the baguette we bought that morning? How much water could I, in good conscience, ditch by the side of the road?

We notched over 5,000 feet of elevation gain for the day when all was said and done, traipsing through hillocks and valleys, and eventually passing over the highest point on the Tour du Mont Blanc—at 8,700 feet. On the way, I felt like my senses were in overdrive, alert to every sound and smell – if only to keep my mind off the pain. The distant chime of cowbells, the tough chew of summer sausage, the thrum of buzzing through my veins as we neared one of the gigantic electric pylons.

But nothing was more common an apparition than the cow pies that blanketed the landscape. At one point, nearing the night’s refuge, there were so many that we thought they might be clues – like the breadcrumbs that Hansel and Gretel left to find their way back home.

Sure enough, they led straight to the wellspring. A pasture of cows, perhaps a hundred of them, lining a mountain grotto – and directly blocking our path. They were all brown dairy cows—presumably responsible for our breakfast that morning—waiting to be weighed in a large truck. The truck was like a machine out of Dr. Seuss. Only, instead of it turning the cows into burgers or adding a star to their bellies, the cows simply trudged up, at a devastating crawl, one end of the ramp and came back down looking exactly as they’d entered.

We were knotted at an impasse, with no way of moving forward. A sheepdog, wise to our intentions, yelped at the cows’ heels every few seconds, sending them trundling along; one wrong step could have left us bucked over the guard fence and into a ravine.

So, instead, we climbed over the protected fence—much to the ire of the cows’ French owner, looking over from his perch high atop a tractor. As we zigzagged our way through the disinterested herd, I kept muttering under my breath “How Now Brown Cow?” – the teaching elocution phrase I’d learned in grade school to practice vowel sounds – like a shaman reciting a mantra meant to guarantee safe passage.

We made it past, safely, but as tired and hungry as ever. Much as I wanted to stay to hear the farmer’s reaction, I was much more eager to see what was on the evening’s menu. And the cows—contributions aside—were standing between us and dinner.

Day 2: Les Contamines

I woke up with my first post-wedding PTSD dream. All the photos had mysteriously gone missing and we had to fly back to Seattle and do it all again. I checked my phone—4:30am—and couldn’t go back to sleep. After a breakfast of Tresor cereal (what else?) we took the bus to Les Houches, the start of the Tour du Mont Blanc. Courtney had hiked a portion of it back in high school and vowed to do it again with her husband-to-be, a feat of premonition only she could make good on.

The 10-mile first day was much harder than I expected. I lumbered along the whole time, breathing heavy, a combination of jet lag and sleep deprivation and being horribly out of hiking shape. But Courtney had a different theory: she told me it was because I only heard what I wanted to hear about the trip.

“I told you it was one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever done,” she said, mildly exasperated. If it was true, I knew it was no small claim: Courtney had backpacked in near constant rain in Alaska for twelve straight days. This must be it, I thought, our first marital dispute. I relayed back what I’d heard her say: a jaunty stroll across the Alps, with all-you-can-eat buffets in refuges along the way. I rested my case. What else did I need to know?

We followed the steep uphill path of an old ski lift in the morning, then went through a half-dozen small towns. We passed quaint churches, flocks of smiling cows, cute bed-and-breakfast inns – many of which had already closed for the season. By noon, hanger began to set in. The place we had intended to stop for lunch was not open until later that afternoon, and those further along in the hike had, much to our chagrin, closed early.

“No one would turn down a paying customer in China,” I sneered, almost without thinking.

“Why don’t you try reframing it?” Courtney insisted. “Like learning to be less entitled.”

I had, unconsciously, been comparing everything I saw on the trip to China. It was the first time that we’d traveled together where I was dependent on Courtney to get around, and I needed, on some level, a baseline of familiarity. I wanted it all to make sense – the steep hills replaced with long staircases, vendors spaced every 300 meters hawking instant noodles and energy drinks, or how we could, at times, walk into someone’s home and request that they make us a meal. But Courtney had been right: why couldn’t I appreciate this experience on its own merit?

By the time we got to our refuge for the night, I was still expecting what I had built up in my mind from hiking in China: cramped bunkbed hostel, dinner spread so pricey I would have to eschew it in favor of rice, packed crowd just to glimpse the sunset at night. But even despite what Courtney had (allegedly) told me, it exceeded all my expectations. The room was beautiful. The views, uninterrupted. And for dinner, we had mashed potatoes and ribs in a raspberry glaze that tasted divine. So, when the meal was over and the choices for dessert were ice cream or chocolate, I didn’t hesitate a moment before responding. “Both,” I said. We were in Europe, after all. Hell, I even had a glass of wine.