Ok it’s only really exciting for me. When we are at home, I have plenty of access to gluten free pizza. Either from the store or when M decides to make homemade pizza. Gluten free pizza has not made it to the stores here in the Chamonix valley and finding the proper dough for making homemade pizza hasn’t yet been accomplished. From all this, you might gather that this is an important slice of my life. Pizza de Moulins to the rescue!
It turns out that right in downtown Chamonix is a pizza place owned and operated by Italians, and they serve gluten free pizza! Fortunately, like a lot of other food here in France, it also happens to be relatively cheap. M and I both had our own pizzas and it was less than 30 Euros total. Plus there is no tipping! Pizza de Moulins is a huge deal for us because now there is somewhere we can eat out if we want and where I can almost be satiated.
Yesterday was Saturday so we did our usual long run. We followed the last 6 miles or so of the Mont Blanc Marathon and then added Col du Brevent to get to our turn around point.
Fortunately there were no scary cables to cross, but there is one section with some handrails to hang on to so you do not fall down the scary stairs. As is becoming the norm, most of the hikers we saw were either American, British or Aussie,with a few Canadians and French in the mix as well.
We made it up the steep climb to the Col and were greeted by a guy who was not very talkative, but he did stand still for a few pictures.
We made it down off the Col and safely back home in time to eat lots of food and watch the day’s carnage on the first stage of the Tour de France. The tour comes fairly close to us this year, but it would be difficult to get to the stage without a car.
Sundays are generally shorter runs for us and we try to choose routes that are interesting, or easier or new to us. Today’s route took us up to a place called Le Peclery. I had been part of the way up the trail a few days ago but had not gone far enough to get to the top or do the loop we planned for today. I had told M that the part of the trail that I had been on was very smooth and not technical at all. My information was correct as far as it went. We found out today that the trail got a fair bit steeper after my turn around point. It also had a gnarly descent down the other side where a 30-40 minute mile was pretty fast! Nothing could have prepared us for the middle section though. We have seen some amazing places since we’ve been here, but Le Peclery might be the prettiest. The pictures will not come close to representing the beauty of the area. The entire top of the climb was shrouded in pink flowers interspersed among the boulders and rocks. We were in awe and had to keep stopping for pictures. We were also the only people there. We haven’t heard anyone talk about the area so we feel like we’ve found a special place.
After taking many pictures we finally made it to the descent. We were not happy that it took us almost as long to get down as it did to get up. Take three steps, switchback, another three steps, another switchback. As usual we felt like the village of Le Tour which we could see below, kept getting lower down the mountain instead of closer. M let out a cheer when we finally got back to the main trail. The descent could not ruin what we had seen though, and we look forward to seeing Le Peclery again.