I’ll come right out with it: we didn’t see the Mona Lisa.

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.

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).

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.”