Mont Blanc for Downderry

Well, it’s been almost a year since our great adventure….so i thought i would post a little update regarding what we’ve been up to and future challenges.

 The Tour du Mont Blanc has been my biggest and most rewarding challenge… the impact it had, has affected my whole life and will be with me forever!

This year….i am preparing for “Chamonix to Zermatt”, a bigger challenge on lots of different levels and i am very much looking forward to it…especially as i may end up doing it solo….which terrifies me and excites me all at once! I never saw myself as a lone adventurer but i am not ready to stop living my dreams…so if i have to do it alone…Bring it on!!!!!

If anyone has any good advice regarding Chamonix to Zermatt, please feel free to comment as i could really do with the help!

Gaelle

No Comments »

That’s right… we arrived back yesterday having successfully completed the Tour of Mont Blanc! The eleven stages took us 14 days to complete, due to a couple of rest days and some bad weather (we had two days of snow above 2,000 metres!), but we managed to complete the circuit still feeling fit and capable. We’re really pleased to have succeeded in what we set out to do and didn’t really want to come back!

In the near future, we will be posting a day by day account of our progress around the Tour, so you can find out exactly what we got up to, and hopefully as a motivator for anybody else who might be thinking about undertaking the Tour of Mont Blanc or a similar long distance walk.

In the meantime, we need to start collecting the oustanding sponsorship money. If you haven’t yet paid your sponsorship, please get in touch with either myself or Gaëlle.

1 Comment »

I’m writing this on the eve of departure! We will be leaving early tomorrow morning to catch a plane at Bristol airport bound for Geneva. The nerves are starting to jangle a little bit, but mostly we’re just really, really excited!

We’ve got no accomodation pre-booked at all, so it will be a case of getting off the plane, jumping on a train and making our way across the border into France and heading for our start point of Les Houches. There we’re going to have to find somewhere to bed down for the night (probably under a tree on a campsite watching the stars!) before heading straight off on our walk in the morning.

The bags are all packed and now we are just drumming our fingers impatiently. Gaëlle even found time to test the weight of her bag before work this morning. Check out the picture below…

No Comments »

Training took a bit of a different turn this weekend… As a birthday treat for Gaëlle, and as a general fitness and confidence boosting session, I booked us for a surfing lesson at Polzeath on Saturday - and the weather brightened especially for the occasion! The sun was shining, the sea was warm and the surf was perfect. We all had a fantastic time (Étienne included), and we could feel the effects of the exercise in our muscles the next day.

As the date of departure gets closer and closer, it’s becoming more and more important to get our confidence and motivation up as well as our general level of fitness. As it is, I think we’re succeeding - we’re both just desperate to get the trip underway, the excitement is becoming too much to bear.

1 Comment »

Last weekend saw us finally getting fed up with the bad weather and heading off into the elements for a big walk anyway. We left straight out of the front door and along the South West Coast Path from Downderry to the far end of Whitsand Bay and then back along the same route. It was 12 miles of walking through driving rain, fog and a biting wind - but the view was dramatic and beautiful and we both really enjoyed ourselves; because, rather than in spite of, the weather. We even shrugged off the cold and stopped for an ice cream at the half way point!

No Comments »

As you may have noticed, we haven’t posted much in the last couple of weeks. Our training has taken a bit of a knock, firstly with myself getting ill, and then Gaëlle getting ill straight after! On top of that, we’ve had the horrendous weather that you’ve all no doubt experienced (and are still experiencing). We’ve managed the odd short walk and occasional boulder problem, but other than that, there’s not a lot to tell you all.

We’re desperately hoping for an improvement in the weather so we can get a final surge of hard training in before we head off for the main event in just a few weeks.

No Comments »

Last weekend, we decided to get a bit of practice at sleeping out… This also meant we didn’t have to walk so far in a single hit, so Étienne was able to join us!

Check out a YouTube video of the weekend here…

Continue Reading »

No Comments »

We truly were blessed with beautiful weather this Easter bank holiday weekend. Thankfully, Gaëlle and I had arranged to make the most of the long weekend by heading to North Wales. It was to be Gaëlle’s first time walking in the mountains - and it turned out to be a huge success! It was also Gaëlle’s first time roughing it in the hills - sleeping in the car, in lay-bys as close to the start of our next day’s route as possible! She took to it with aplomb though, despite the sore knees and cramped accomodation - it must have been my talent with a trangia, a gas stove and a boil in the bag meal .

Hit the “Continue Reading” link to find out exactly what we got up to!

Continue Reading »

3 Comments »