Yurts are cold. This is true. However, it was a very comfortable night. They gave us a lot of duvets and blankets. It was nice being in stuff so soft. But my head was cold, so I should have worn a toque while sleeping.

When we got up, we had breakfast. Today was beautiful. Finally. There were a few clouds, but overall we could finally see the views we had been working so hard to earn. We left late, and then climbed up even higher. Once we got over the pass, it was a long downhill to Les Ville des Glaciers. That took about three hours. A half hour later we got to Les Mottets. The place was packed already, but I went in and cancelled my reservation. It was too early to stop on such a nice day.

Then up, up, up for the Col de Seigne. It took about two hours of solid climbing to get there, but we were able to cross the border into Italy. It became a special challenge to keep going because there was a tour group of 15 people right behind us. You don’t want to let that pass you or you’ll never get ahead of them.

The views down into Italy were great, and it was all downhill. We even got a car ride from some nice people for the last half kilometer.

We learned that Italy is in the middle of a dumb experiment. They are stopping all bus service in Courmayeur and surrounding villages for September until December. As part of our plan to do this hike involves skipping boring parts and using the bus, this is suddenly becoming expensive. Even our taxi driver acknowledge it was dumb, even if it is helping him earn even more money.

We didn’t even try to go to a hostel. We’ve been burned too much on that. So instead we went to a hotel. It was somewhat hard to find as we were using a local to phone for us, and one of the first that had vacancy was charging €1,100 a night. Which is a little steep. But we have a nice one now with a raging river just outside.

2015-9-4 23:42