This time last year: Chamonix

On this date last year, we were still in the Alps, though back on the French side in Chamonix. Chamonix is known as the Death Sport Capital of the World. If you are mere hikers, as we are, you are seriously looked down upon in Chamonix. The true athletes are there to scale sheer faces of rock using nothing but a single ice axe, or to parapent off the mountain peaks after soloing them, or to do something else outrageously crazy and dangerous that nobody else has done before. Anything that is considered safe or that has been done before is too pedestrian a pastime for most of these people. To be honest, the parapenting is not all that dangerous, and you can ride up on lifts and take tandem flights with an instructor. When we were planning our trip, that was my back-up plan: if I wasn't pregnant by the time we went to Europe, I was going to go parapenting as a booby prize. Luckily it didn't come to that (and Chad still thinks I would have chickened out at the last minute anyway!)

Oh well... bring on the mediocrity. We still enjoyed the views of the Mer de Glace, supposedly the world's longest glacier:

And it was cool to see the climbers heading for the summit of Mont Blanc, even if we weren't among them. We took the lifts up to an observation point around 13,000 feet, with the summit being around 16,000 feet. The observation point is the highest I would have been comfortable going while pregnant - there is surprisingly little literature available on being at altitude while pregnant. We have high altitude experience and I knew I'd likely be OK up to around 15,000 feet, but we still only stayed at the observation point for a half hour or so to see some climbers off, and then booted it back down:

We also enjoyed the hiking around Lac Blanc - very similar to Lake Louise in colour and backdrop:

While we were in Chamonix, I called home to check our messages. I was expecting the doctor's report about the ultrasound I'd had the day before we left on our trip. The technician had told me she found the heartbeat, but I was still anxious to hear the full report. Three minutes and $43 later, I had it. This was pretty infuriating, since the signs posted at the hotel said there was no surcharge for calling North America. I did get the charge reversed when I called to complain once I got my Visa bill. Even though getting the happy news was worth far more than $43, the thought of paying that much for such a short call made me positively ill!