Short summary -- first day, last day... and Mont Blanc.
Dinner at the refuge was the polar opposite of the previous night -- copious and very good (we all had Tartiflette). However, since I hadn't slept well the night before, it was one of those evenings where I struggled to stay awake after dessert (the 100ml of pear brandy that I was served when I asked for a digestif may have also played a role)... and in fact I was in bed by 9PM. I'm not sure when the others retired.
The following morning I was responsible for a little comedy of errors. To begin with I realized that the night before I had forgotten to ask for picnic lunches to be prepared. But in the morning only the hut warden was there, and he apologised but said that he had too many other things to do preparing breakfast and taking payments. So I was fortunate that another hiker, overhearing my problem, offered to drive me down to Champagny-en-Bas (where there was a bakery and an épicerie) to buy stuff. Then during breakfast I managed to spill a large quantity of rice crispies on the floor when the dispenser malfunctioned... which the by now thoroughly harried hut warden cleaned up. I let Jorge pay and snuck out... I figured the warden probably would be happier if he didn't see me again :-).
Today was Lidia's first hike, and the last day for Erik, Jorge, and Ioana mare. I should perhaps explain -- half of all Romanian women are called Ioana, at least in my experience, and we have two of them on the hike... one smaller and thus "mica" and the other large, thus "mare" (Romanian for small and big, respectively). Ioana mare is Jorge's partner, and Ioana mica is the one whose pack I carried over the high pass a couple of days ago. Ioana mare has been suffering from a bad cold that Jorge thoughtfully passed on to her just before the hike... and it has been very impressive to see her, despite the illness and sleeping very poorly, march up and over each pass along the way. I'm pretty sure that, in her circumstances, I would not have done as well.
The hike started out with a bang -- climbing steeply over 600m before changing to a more gentle incline most of the rest of the way to the almost 2500m pass. Even Lidia's second set of lungs (which she normally uses to talk with, while the first set are used to gather oxygen for her legs) were pressed into service during the steep climb (I could tell because she stopped talking for a while ;-). But the extensive training she did yesterday when she climbed up to meet us on the way down to Champagny was clearly suffiicient, and she made it up to the pass without undue difficulty.
We had lunch shortly before the pass and then spent almost four very pleasant hours walking down to our hotel in Montchavin, talking in various configurations and languages. We'll miss all three of them when they leave during the rest day tomorrow... a rest day, which, I should add, I'm very much looking forward to -- I've spent 28 hours on the trails over the last three days and my body needs a break!
And Mont Blanc? Well, on the way down Lidia pointed it out. Erik and I were sceptical, thinking that it lay in another direction, but we both figured that expressing doubt would not be the wisest course of action towards the end of a long day of hiking. And just as well -- at dinner our charming waitress (an English girl from Cambridge) confirmed that it was indeed Mont Blanc. A narrow escape :-).
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