Argentiere, silver platter in French, is just uphill from Chamonix, about 9 km to be exact. From this village we head over the Col de Balme. The guidebook says “allows you to get into your stride with ease”. Let’s hope so.

We had a leisurely start this morning as we have nine KM total for today’s walk, a mostly forested walk along the stream coming down from the higher passes. There were number of people and mt. bikes on the trail most of which were going downhill since you can ride the train up to the top and walk or ride back down. We haven’t seen any other trekkers as of yet although we seen a number of young climbers waiting at the various bus stops along the road with their gear and ropes hanging off their backpacks.

We’ve taken advantage of the upscale facilities in the last two hotels we stayed in. They both had pools as well as Jacuzzis (which are not hot tubs because the Jacuzzi’s aren’t that warm). The current hotel we are staying in has a stainless steel pool as well as a stainless steel hot tub. The pool is half inside and half outside, and makes me want to install one in our condo.

This mural and the one below tell in one dimension what is Chamonix’s history is all about. What’s most hard to believe is that the same time of the Civil War 1865, the first ascent of the Matterhorn was made by an Englishman. His French guide was unfortunately killed on the way down and remains a hero of this town.

We really enjoyed getting here as well. The train ride north around Lake Geneva down to Martiny and then taking a cog railroad up of the mountainside thru and along a number of really interesting and beautiful Swiss towns to the French boarder, and then on into Chamonix. The town was filled with ultramarathon runners, actually ultra trail runners. The runs were four distances and the longest of which was 300 km with 24,000 meters of ascent. I suspect some of Silverton’s “hard rock 100” runners were competing here as well.

Our hotel had a rooftop pool sauna and Jacuzzi available to us as soon as we arrived. So we took advantage of that and the same time watching the clouds run past all the glaciers in the Mont Blanc cirque. Stanna’s plan to keep me from seeing menu prices is working really well, she got rooms that include dinner and breakfast. Our first dinner was outstanding.

Tomorrow we start hiking in earnest. We’ll turn the Spot Locator on should you want to follow us on our track.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in a European urban city and Geneva is a great one to start with for a return. This city center seems tight, clean and has all the features close in, such as their Lake, historic buildings, the nightlife, shopping and even then Apple Store right downtown. Stanna’s choice of the hotel put us within a block on half of one of the main drags and we can very easily access just about everything of interest to us.

One thing we couldn’t pass up was a famous Swiss circus which Stanna saw with her trip last year. The Knie circus is world-famous but they never leave Switzerland. They travel throughout the country on a one year cycle and it is a very very professional family Circus much larger than I could possibly imagine. The entire performance is almost 3 hours including intermission which itself is interesting as well. They got all sorts of animal acts, acrobatics, contortionists, unicyclists and even trained flying and talking parrots. It was impossible to shoot all the action of the trained horses, camels, elephants, high wire acts and all but we did get a picture of the finale closed below.

We also saw a bicycle flash mob block the streets downtown as we were having dinner. Probably 250 bicycles “slow riding” thru the downtown streets in one long mob.