While we’ve been planning for Argentina, we’ve had to get a head start on planning our trip for next fall, too - the Tour de Mont Blanc.
What is the Tour de Mont Blanc? It’s one of the world’s top 10 must-do hikes. I don’t know according to who. I don’t know what the other 9 are. Once of them has to be the Inca Trail, right? Presumably Everest? Maybe something in Patagonia? I digress…
The Tour de Mont Blanc is a 165km, 10-day hike through the French, Swiss & Italian Alps with a total elevation gain of over 10,000 metres.
Yup.
And with the company we are using, you have to book a year in advance.
What’s the deal? Well, we heard about this from one of our neighbours who did it last September and loved it. I became obsessed and convinced EDP we needed to do this while we were still young enough to be able to recover. And now we’re booked. We’re doing the self-guided version with Mont Blanc Treks. They handle nearly everything for us. We have to get ourselves to Chamonix but they arrange all of our accommodations & most of our meals, give us daily maps with our routes, make sure we have safety & emergency information, and many other important things I’m definitely forgetting. Alex and Jude were amazing through the booking process so I can only imagine how good the actual trek will be.
While we’re hiking, we’ll need to figure out our lunches. Most of our accommodations will offer a bagged lunch we can pick up in the mornings but there are also little groceries we can pick things up from. We need to make sure we have plenty of water and do the actual walking. We are taking a rest day part way through and we did also opt for baggage transfer so we only need to carry a day pack with our water, lunch, layers, audiobooks & camera. This should make things a little easier on our bones.
We leave next September, finishing just before the cable cars close up for the season. I’ll be spending the next year prepping with yoga, trying to find local hikes with good elevation, and lots of quality time with my physiotherapist. I have two main goals - the first is to finish and the second is to not be in pain for weeks after. I’m trying to keep the bar low but honestly, the pain one is a pretty big ask.