Alex and Marie are here!

June 25, 2018

Alex is here!  Today, both Alex and the Vigliotti’s granddaughter Marie (Josh and Ashley’s sister) flew in to Geneva.  Marie got in about 10 am from the United Arab Emirates where she lives with her family – her dad works there running the University of Lausanne’s extension campus.  She will be staying with her grandparents this summer before leaving on a mission for the LDS church to the Lyon, France mission that includes the French-speaking part of Switzerland where we are right now.  So she will go home to UAE for a short time, report to the Missionary Training Center in Spain, and then basically come back to this area – either in France or Switzerland.  She and Alex are about the same age, and I first met her as a baby when I came for Noemi’s wedding. 

Alex had a very long trip here, but she made it in around 4 pm this afternoon!  When she was supposed to wrestle Helen Maroulis in Final X, she would have been in Pennsylvania on June 23.  She had planned to take a bus on June 24 to NYC where we had a flight for her to join us in Geneva.  When her Final X match was postponed, Alex was all the way on the other coast in Vancouver, Canada.  Knowing the situation, Marcie, who helps run Titan Mercury (Alex wrestling club and her generous sponsor) offered to fly her to NYC so she could still catch her flight to meet up with us.  Thank you again, Titan Mercury!  But Alex had long couple of days.  She got the Vancouver airport at around 4 am on the 24^th to catch a 6 am flight to Seattle.  She then flew to NYC on her second flight where she originally was going to wait 5 or 6 hours to catch her flight to Europe.  That third flight was delayed a couple of hours so she spent even more time in the JFK airport.  She was supposed to have plenty of time in Dusseldorf, Germany to make the connection to the fourth flight to Geneva, but with the delay, she barely caught the flight.  She made it though, and we picked her up in Geneva a little after 4 pm today. Fortunately, with all of the travelling she has started doing for wrestling, she is becoming a pro at sleeping on planes.  It’s so good to have her here!

Because Becky had mentioned the other day that Alex would be sad that she had missed Maria’s fondue, that’s what we had again on Monday.  Ashley and Jonathon came over for dinner to see Marie, and another friend of the Vigliotti’s Simone Pierre came as well so we had a big group for fondue, and of course, we had to play some petanque afterward as well.  We have been truly blessed being here and now having Alex join us!

Just chillin'

June 24, 2018

Today was just kind of a mellow day.  We went to church with the Vigliottis today, and that is always fun for the rest of the family when they don’t speak French.  There are several people in the congregation here who speak English including a couple of American families so there are people who can help out.  There usually is someone who can interpret in classes – Josh has been great helping the kids.  They are kind of lost during Sacrament meeting though – I try to give them the gist of what is going on, but many of the talks are given by people speaking French but with other accents, and I find myself struggling to catch the details.  It’s all good though.

Fabio is the bishop of the ward right now, and he asked Zac and I to bless the sacrament in French if we could this Sunday.  Zac was a little nervous, but he wanted to do it.  So this past week, he has been practicing with me as well as with Mimmo, Maria and other people at the house who was willing to help.  He wrote the prayer out phonetically, and he did a great job.  He got the chance to do it a second time when Fabio took the youth over to give the sacrament to a lady who is in a nursing home.  

After church today, there was a ward potluck lunch so that was nice getting to visit with people a little more.  Like I mentioned, there are several people who speak English so I think everyone had a good time.  Afterward, we just had a chance to relax at the Vigliottis.  That evening, with Maria and Mimmo we went over to the town of Morge that borders the lake between Lausanne and Geneva.  We drove by the old apartment where I had lived as a missionary and had a nice walk near the lake.  Pretty relaxing day!

No-go for Alex's match & safety-minded dinosaurs

June 23, 2018

After our slightly taxing day yesterday, we decided to sleep in and just get moving whenever we all woke up.  So we cleaned out the apartment, re-packed the car and said au revoir to Chamonix.  We drove back to the Vigliottis through Martigny, Switzerland (the other way around Lac Leman – or Lake Geneva).  It was a beautiful drive, and we saw preparations for the Tour de France that will be coming through that area next month – one of these was a dinosaur wearing a yellow bike helmet.  It was a little discouraging for me to see a one-legged bicyclist going up a mountain that I know would give me a heart attack within the first kilometer.  Good for him, though!

We made it back to the Vigliottis and had some time to just rest up and relax for a while because Maria, Mimmo and Josh were all heading out to a church activity.  Fabio, Elodie and their kids came over to swim for a little while so we had a chance to hang out with them for a little while.  Again, their kids are ridiculously cute! 

We thought that we were on our for dinner because Maria and Mimmo were coming home a little late, but we thought wrong – Maria decided to whip up some fondue for us after she got home.  This lady has endless amounts of energy.  We also had a chance to see Ashley, the Vigliotti's granddaughter who I first met when she was an infant.   We had seen her husband Jonathan a couple of times already, but as a doctor doing her residency, Ashley has a crazy schedule so this was the first time we were able to visit with her. 

I almost forgot to mention – tonight was the night that we were supposed to stay up late to watch Alex wrestle Olympic and World champion Helen Maroulis in her Final X match to determine the US senior world team.  It would have been streaming starting at midnight in Switzerland.  However, we got a FaceTime call on Monday from Alex saying that their match had to be postponed because Helen is not cleared yet from a concussion.  I’m sorry for Helen, but it was also a little sad for us too because we knew that Alex could have been on the trip with us a little longer.  She is joining us on Monday the 25^th, and we thought about trying to move it up once we heard about Helen, but by that point, all the tickets had been purchased, and Alex couldn't have gotten here much earlier than we had planned. 

Don't tell us we can't do something!

What Lac Blanc will look like a little later this summer:

What we saw:

June 22, 2018

Today was our challenging yet rewarding day.  We had planned to go to the Mer de Glace today, but because the Aiguille du Midi was closed, we had already done that.  We had wanted to get in at least some kind of hike in the Alps, and we found ourselves with extra time today.  I have done the hike to Lac Blanc in the past (the first time when I was much younger and in better shape, we had walked from a campground on the far side of Chamonix to the village of La Paz just to start the full hike up, and then had to come back again).  This time we drove to La Paz, and decided to take the gondola up to the La Flegere station that cuts off about half of the hike if I remember correctly).  We were a little concerned as well because Becky’s foot had been hurting at the beginning of the trip, mine had recently been sore, and Zac is still recovering a little from minor ingrown toenail surgery on both feet right before the trip, but we figured we would try and see what we could do.

When I went to buy tickets for the gondola lift, the lady asked if we had better shoes or hiking poles for the hike.  As Californians who had packed light, we had didn’t really have good hiking gear.  She said that we wouldn’t be able to get all the way to the lake because there had been a lot of snow this year and this early in summer some of the path would still be blocked by snow.  She suggested some other easier hikes we could do once we got to the Flegere station though.  We did feel a little silly going up in the gondola because most people had real hiking boots, two hiking poles and layers of clothing.  We had shorts, t-shirts and tennis shoes (I did have water, ponchos for all of us, and our lunch in my back so we weren’t completely unprepared). 

Anyway, we decided to hike as close to Lac Blanc as we could and would turn around when we couldn’t get through.  None of us are in as good of shape as we would like to be so we took it slowly and rested when we needed to.  We were hoping to see a mountain goat or two, but that didn’t happen at first, but we did see a marmot. 

We got to a place where snow blocked the path so we decided to eat our lunch there before heading back down.  Katie (who probably had the shoes with the least tread) really wanted to keep going though so after lunch, I looked for another way up. I found a way to climb over some rocks where we still had to cross snow but it was at a relatively flat place instead of uphill.  So we decided to keep going.  Not too long after we found the other path, we were rewarded with seeing our first mountain goat – which we wouldn’t have seen if we had gone back.  We may not be in peak shape or have fancy hiking gear, but we are stubborn.  We found alternate paths where needed, and we eventually made it all the way up to Lac Blanc.  It was not the same scene Becky and I had seen before because it was still mostly covered in ice and snow, but it was still pretty spectacular.  We made it! 

Going down was not fun, especially for Katie’s slick shoes.  She was probably the best going up, but slipped a couple times coming down.  We made it back down to the gondola station about a half hour before the gondolas stopped running (we would not have been happy campers if we had been late for the last gondola down the mountain).  It all worked out though. 

We made it back in time for Zac and Katie to get a few more runs on the summer luge which Katie really wanted to do again.  Then this evening we found a charming hole-in-the wall bar/restaurant in old town and rewarded ourselves with crepes for dinner and dessert.  We have really enjoyed Chamonix, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants an Alpine experience!