Boondock Puffins

Tom’s mum always said to us that it wouldn’t feel like home until we’d been away and come back. As we don’t have too much time before work kicks off, we took an overnight trip to Chamonix – well sort of, we stayed an hour outside of Chamonix in a tiny settlement called Cordon (not apparently anything to do with Cordon Bleu!).

Riding up and over the Alps, creating a constant pattern of Z’s as we encountered switch back after switch back, was an unforgettable and exhilarating experience. Evidence of the hot French summer and subsequent droughts were plentiful – several rivers all but dry, including one with cows using the riverbed as their new home.

At the top of one mountain pass, we had to stop to both admire the 20 or so other motorbikes (and the same number of less interesting road bikes) as well as investigate the French pastoral version of a service station… a market stall selling chilled drinks, cheese and meats.

Once over towards the other side of the Alps, Eliza had a good time probing Tom’s geographical knowledge of any and all features: how do glaciers form? What causes clouds? How do dams generate power? (Some of these are still unanswered!)

Finally, we spotted Mont Blanc – with its head frustratingly in the clouds for much of the day. There is something about the feeling of seeing a mountain of that size in the flesh that is difficult to explain. Of course we’ve both seen postcards or online pictures of it, and both seen it in the distance on various motorway or backroad journeys through the Alps, but there is a unique sensation that occurs when given time to properly sit and study such a feat of nature that is unparalleled. Reminds me of Robin Williams telling Matt Damon that he might know all the facts but he won’t know the smells, the noises, the feelings of being in Paris and seeing the Eiffel Tower.

The view from our room for the night was spectacular – if you are ever at a loss and in the Cordon area in summer (I think it’s probably quite pricey in winter), we highly recommend Les Roches Fleuries as a place to stay. All hotels in the area claim “mountain views” but this really does supply them!

Having enjoyed our time in the French countryside we headed into Chamonix. What a lovely place! Parking is a bit tricky (the bike was useful here, we left it down an alley locked up properly, just by the pedestrianised section), but the picturesque city is well worth a visit.

Perhaps our view will be forever skewed by the fact that we went to see it accidentally during a trail running festival, but we were left with a very unique impression. Imagine taking a Disney French town, then replacing all the stereotypically dressed workers with their donkeys, berets and strings of onions and replacing them with Lycra-clad, running-company-branded individuals. This was the Chamonix that we encountered. While this was interesting in a slightly depressing I-should-go-for-a-run-or-at-least-put-down-this-ice-cream sort of way, the heat of the day – a close 35*C with bright sunshine and very little shade – was not ideal for our motorbike-gear wearing selves. Calling it quits early left us with just enough time to formulate a fun plan home.

When do you know that your other half is just as crazy as you? For us it is when we make decisions like the following: having already driven 2 hours in our day already (and having been sent by the sat nav up a cycle route that leads you to have to waddle backwards down a very steep hill while balancing 240kg of pure metal muscle and looking for somewhere to turn around), rather than taking the straight 1.5 hour route home, we pick the most circuitous path that Google Maps cheerfully informs us will take 4 and a bit hours and will take us on a brief tour of Switzerland and Italy before helpfully dropping us back over the mountains near home.

As if this wasn’t enough, we also had to stop a a local phone shop to sort out our phone contracts as the data we’d been relying on from Tom’s phone suddenly cut out (thanks Vodaphone!). We were informed that it is impossible to start a contract without proof that we live in France, which is a piece of paperwork we somehow didn’t think to bring on our 2 day jaunt out of our area, and after a broken conversation with a lots of “uhhh”s coming from Eliza as she did her best to deal with the intricacies of negotiation in French, we settled on a bog standard pay as you go, re-entering the world of data and maps just in time to set off on our crazy route home and still hopefully get home before the sun set.

The journey home proved pretty spectacular, particularly the route between Chamonix and Switzerland (avoiding tolls) – you go up on several switch backs before a valley suddenly opens up in front to reveal the wonderfully near (conforming to all Swiss stereotypes) town of Martigny – picturesque if unpronounceable! We of course stopped off to grab some chocolate from the garage so that we could properly feel that we had visited the land of cocoa mastery and holey cheese.

The route turns swiftly south and takes you over into Italy. While we weren’t here for very long either, we pulled off the main route into the very small settlement of Saint Pierre to grab an ice cream. How is it that Italian gelato is superior to all other ice cream in every regard? The tiny cafe we called at was a tiny slice of Italian heaven – a place where all the locals stared at us as we entered, and the elderly proprietor helped us choose ice creams by pot size and chatted to us with enthusiastic gestures and noises from both sides about the joys of motorcycles.

The route home up and over the mountains passing from Italy back into France was one of the most awesome roads of the trip – at every switch back, you were greeted with either a view of Mont Blanc looming up ahead, or a parting shot of the Italian countryside fading away beneath.

We made it home just as the dusk set, the cold descended and our bums lost feeling from the long ride. The exploratory trip? A success.