Today has turned out to be quite beautiful and we even saw little pieces of what may be the Matterhorn. We are not sure because the whole thing is still surrounded by clouds. The parts we have seen are covered with new snow. One of the webcams, which you can see by googling Zermatt webcams and clicking on the word English in the first option that comes up on Google, shows lots of snow. We have seen several people headed up with skis!
For the most part it has not rained today here in the main part of Zermatt and there has been some very nice sunshine. Picturesque does not begin to describe this little village and the huge mountains that surround it. One could easily spend all day and many gigabytes of space on their phone taking picture after picture.
M and I did a nice run this morning while trying to find the beginning of the race course. After some searching, we did manage to hook on to at least a part of the course although we did miss a turn and ended up in Eggen instead of Sunneggen. As it turns out we were only a little below where we meant to be. At that point I was pretty tired so I convinced M that we should turn around so as not to wear ourselves out too much. We did have about 2500 feet of elevation gain in 3.8 miles which should tell you something about how steep everything is around here. In fact the first part of our run was so steep that had it not been for the lower altitude, we would have been hiking and not running. I must say, and I think M would agree, that the trails here are the best we have run on. We have very nice trails at home in Colorado and we are thankful to have them. The trails here seem to be almost manicured and I suspect to some degree that they are manicured. There is hardly a rock or root to worry about tripping over. Most of the trails consist of small pebbles or just nicely packed dirt. I think both of us further realized that our race will be challenging, but that it will also be spectacular.
Now on to the most challenging aspect of our trip thus far. Grocery shopping! Everything we read on the internet (where everything is true) said that grocery shopping would be easy because everything has English translations written on it. Well that is a lie because so far, nothing but peanut butter has anything written in English. The truth is that none of this would be a problem if I didn’t have to eat Gluten Free. We have managed to figure out enough to get by and I won’t starve, but it was a near thing. What we have figured out is that the cheese is truly amazing, as is the butter. We had trouble in the store figuring out which product was milk mainly because it wasn’t necessarily refrigerated. A nice lady from Britain came along and immediately recognized our confusion (obviously having seen those looks before) and guided us to the correct milk. As it turns out, the milk is also much tastier than at home but of course I have no idea why that is.
We are looking forward to playing tourist again tomorrow by going to some of the local shops. Hopefully I’ll feel like another update afterward. Tschuss!
