Then life changed. Suddenly I was no longer married and had my children only half the time. Last summer my co-parent and I agreed to give each other two weeks off. Two weeks when he would take the children on holiday, and I could… do whatever I want. After the tumult of the previous few years, I could have lain on a beach. But I wanted to walk. I wasn’t after catharsis, exactly, but I was after a connection: with nature and with myself. An alignment in rhythm between my body and mind. Eleven years ago, at 30, I walked across Spain, wondering what the next decade would bring. Now, at 41, I was asking the question again.
The Tour du Mont Blanc traditionally sets off from Chamonix, the birthplace of European mountaineering culture. Trekkers stay in rifugi, backpacker hostels, or in hotels in the small villages. The mountains are known for unpredictable weather. I heard stories of people who had walked the entire route and never seen Mont Blanc. During our first few days, the sky was volatile: fast-moving clouds, fogs, mists wrapping themselves over foothills. We began the second day, one of the longest at 13 miles, in pouring rain, which turned to ice pellets, and at 8,100 feet we were walking through snow. But we unloaded at Refuge des Mottets in piercing sunshine.
Mottets is an ancestral Alpine chalet perched dramatically in the remote Vallée des Glaciers. There is a warm, wood-beamed dining room where hikers play cards, read and drink beer or tea. Dinner was rustic local food, served family-style in stone bowls: bean and potato soup, ratatouille with homemade pork sausage, stacks of rugged brown bread and wedges of floral Tomme de Savoie. Afterwards one of the cooks rolled out a hand-cranked music box, an instrument I had never seen, and played “Les Champs-Élysées”. Every French person sang along.
