This morning we were farewelled from Paris by a man who did the loudest, longest belch I have ever heard in my life as we walked down the street in Montmartre to the metro station. Hmm…all class! Au revouir Paris! Haha Actually, there were a lot of interesting characters around on the metro this morning, as we left fairly early & our travel coincided with many people just coming home from a big Saturday night out. While we were rather bright & chipper & excited for our trip to Chamonix, there were a lot of bleary eyes & wafting smells of beer & cigarettes throughout the trains.

We took the train from Paris (Gare de Lyon) to Bellegarde, then from Bellegarde to St Gervais. From there we took a smaller train, called the Mont Blanc Express, up the mountain to Chamonix. It was a breathtakingly beautiful train ride. The sky was a gorgeous, bright blue, & there were just a few fluffy white clouds scattered around. As we got higher up in the mountains we began to see snow capped peaks appearing & we opened the train windows & stuck our heads right out to take in the incredible view.

We arrived in the town of Les Houches, which is about 10 minutes out of the main centre of Chamonix & quickly found our way to our hotel/chalet, which is a gorgeous little wooden building with a slated roof - very French/Swiss mountain cabin-esque! :) We have a beautiful little room (well, actually it's not really all that little, it's rather lovely & spacious room with a big bathroom & a bath!!!) with a quaint slanted ceiling & a view of the mountains. And the hotel has an indoor heated pool, which we went for a dip in during the afternoon. Not bad for 33 euro a night!

In the evening we had dinner in the hotel's restaurant where we tried a very traditional meal of fondue, with came with local meats, salad, & bread for dipping. Wow…it was a LOT of cheese! It was really, really yummy, but after about 2 or 3 fully dunked pieces of bread I had to change my technique & go for scraping a bit of cheese off the spoon onto the bread because it was SO rich! However, a delicious & very French/Swiss way to spend our first night in Chamonix :) (I also had really strange dreams that night…is it true that eating lots of cheese before bed makes your dreams weird?? Because as a one off case study, I would say yes!)