Mont Blanc for Downderry

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.

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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…

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Hello,

I’m Gaëlle and I have finally plucked up the courage to write my first blog…

I used to be scared of everything, seriously scared of everything… the dark, height, confined spaces, crowd, people… and above all scared of changes… so what did i do? I moved from one side of the country to another, left my friends behind, my job, my house and decided to move where i had always wanted to live, a lovely seaside village in beautiful Cornwall.

Now, for someone that even a trip to the local shop could trigger a panic attack that was a massive task! but sometimes you need to follow that inner little voice that tells you to go for it!

15 months down the line, things could not be more different than what they used to be…. somehow I managed to talk myself into doing something pretty amazing for someone like me… on the 27th of July I will be flying out to Geneva (already a challenge in itself as I hate flying! So Dave’s first problem won’t have anything to do with the trip… it will be to get me on that plane! drunk! without anyone noticing!!) and from then, with my little rucksack (big scary thing really!) my tired legs (hopefully real muscly by then!) and new really really really fit body (that is wishful thinking!!) I will walk the TOUR DU MONT BLANC!!!!!! how cool is that?! (…that is what my son, Etienne, says… to which I answer “real coooooooool!!” thinking all along… “why? why? why????”)

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We had to take a break from running yesterday… so we could shoot up to Bristol to see the Eagles of Death Metal rocking the Ansom Rooms. Hey… life can’t be all work and no play! Anyway, we must have sweated out a stone in weight through head-banging!

Click here for a dodgy Youtube vid I took on my mobile phone.

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Hello and welcome to the montblancfordownderry.co.uk weblog. In the coming weeks and months you will be able to keep up-to-date with Gaëlle’s thoughts on her training and preparation for the Tour of Mont Blanc at the end of July; and with how the sponsorship campaign for Downderry school is coming along.

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