Sunday

Sunday
Waking up at a communal from was interesting and I was wide awake when I walked into the communal bathroom and was greeted by BonGiorno from a topless Italian female hiker and her husband.  The Americans and the Japanese get dressed in the bathroom stalls, the Italians and French have no qualms.  Our guide wanted us ready with boots and packs by 8 so we shoved off at 8:20 as none of us were as successful with testifying our packs this morning as we were loading them to the overnight yesterday.
The day started out cloudy so we all had a t-shirt and a jacket on and peeled down to just the shirt as we started hiking.  As we looked behind, we could see rain at the French border and it chased us down the valley as we header for Switzerland finally catching us mid morning as we descended into the valley to meet the van, leave behind the crap overstuffing our bags and have a second breakfast (just like.a Hobbit).



 The ascent up over the Swiss border was very hard and a bit slippery and psychologically a bit hard for me as I was still protecting my face.  The border at the top of the mountain had wind gusts up to about 20 miles per hour and it was cold. Once over the border we descended a little bit and tried for 30 minutes to find a non-windy, relatively dry place for lunch before we succeeded.  After lunch, the descent continued for 2.5 hours and included a stop at a building with historic signs about Napoleon's invasion of Italy.  He apparently hiked we route we took in the opposite direction as well as some notes on World War Ii activity in the area.  Nothing too exciting there but it is hard to imagine, Italian and French troops hiking in these mountains during winter.  The Swiss had it easier but did patrol this area to keep their neutrality.







We are in another auberage tonight, in the town of La Fouly but this one has showers in the room and we share bathrooms just among ourselves.  We did tons of laundry tonight so everything is drying in our room.
Dinner was raccalet, a Swiss cheese heated and served with potatoes.  Two of my favorite food groups and rather good.  The portions were small but I had three.  We tried a local wine, Gamay which was really nice.  Tomorrow we walk past the vineyards where the grapes are grown.