Mary in the Alps

The French Alps. One minute you're riding along in the train across a hills and plains, speckled with trees, and then suddenly these giant spikes of stone are protruding up from the ground. It's not a subtle transition, and it got our attention after spending weeks in relatively flat areas of Italy. I say relatively flat, because they have plenty of knee-throbbing hills and the people tended to build fortified towns and cities on them. Even in Gubbio, the mountains were glorified hills, where trees and grass grew almost the whole way to the top. With the Alps, things stop growing at a certain altitude, and then everything turns to craggy stone. And then it gets covered with snow.

It's my developed opinion that there's nothing like a mountain to really remind you of how small and young you are. As our train wound its way through the mountains to leave Italy, the trip actually became less interesting but for all the tunnels through which we had to pass. This of course is another testimony to the enormity of the mountains; you're not going over top of them, and it's pointless to try and weave a course between them. It must really have been easier to blast holes through them.

At the last stop in Italy, customs officers boarded our train and made sure we weren't terrorists by checking our passports. Once again, by not flying, we didn't get a stamp on our passports, so our return trip is going to be devoid of any evidence that we visited Italy or Germany. Apparently we got off very lucky: people we would meet much later would tell us that on their exit from Italy, the train sat there for an hour as personnel and engines were changed. I think we must have gotten a better deal as our train was bound for Paris, and was already of the french train system.

I wrote a fair bit on the train while Amy read, so after a while we acclimatized to the massive mountains that meandered by in the background. It wasn't that long before we arrived in Chambery, a city close to my cousin Mary's village in the Alps, Bourg St. Maurice. Our trip to visit Mary, and choice to travel to Chambery, offered her an opportunity to audition Chambery as a potential "big city" for her to visit when she needed a "big city" escape from the Bourg.

A little background about my cousin Mary. The last time I'd seen her was over twenty-five years ago, a event marked by a now legendary tale in which our parents had decided to be efficient and park both her and I in the same perambulator (we were each around three or four years old at the time) and Mary bit me. Unfortunately, occasion has not brought us together in the intervening years, so any time Mary and I are connected in the same thought or sentence, this bit of ill will is naturally reminded to any who know the unfortunate incident. I think I got over it, as I have absolutely no memory of the event and the only proof of the story is a photograph of the two of us in the oversized perambulator (stroller, in case it's not a familiar word) and I was willing to chance that twenty-five years of growing up had softened Mary up a bit.

Mary is a world traveller. She lived and worked for a year in Madrid teaching English to high-power executives, made coffee and bought a house in New Zealand, and then met a guy which prompted a return to Europe in order to live with him in France. When we tumbled off the train in Chambery, we were easy targets, and she picked us out readily. I of course recognized her immediately, and if there were any lingering doubts about either of us being bitten, they seemed to disappear immediately.

Again, stories about family are often hard to sit through for anyone who doesn't know the players, but there are plenty of interesting bits that I'm going to relate here. We met Mary's dog Sheesha (named after a mountain). There was some discussion as to what breed Sheesha is, but to me she looks like a mix between a black lab and a collie. Whatever she is, she's got a lot of energy and after getting to know you, she's very friendly. We would not get the chance to meet Mary's boyfriend Severin, for really interesting and exotic reasons involving him working in Qatar painting something while hanging from mountain climbing ropes. However, we were introduced to a coffee machine which bore his name, mounted proudly in the kitchen. But I get ahead of myself; we had first to survive the trip back to the house, and kitchen.

Our walk through Chambery was uneventful, but interesting enough with enough big-ticket items to score high on Mary's radar such that she'd feel it was worth visiting for a big city fix. We caught up fast and happened upon our very first stupendous coincidence: Mary had done a WWOOF visit on the very same farm that we were going to visit in the Ardeche, just two years ago. In the end there are only so many farms participating in the WWOOF program, and it happens that Ronna and Honore's farm has a lot going for it in its description, so I suppose it's not that big a coincidence. However, it is just one in a series of coincidences that makes me feel like I have very much come late to the party: I never knew about WWOOF, and every time we tell people about it, they seem to know all about it, know someone that did it, or have done it themselves.

The drive from Chambery to Bourg St. Maurice ("the Bourg") is only an hour, but it was a white-knuckled ride for me. I should know this by now: you get used to the roads you drive regularly, and the road looks completely different from the driver's seat. But for us, never having been there before, driving high into the mountains, looking out the window down hundreds of feet as it all speeds by, it took some getting used to. Quick lesson about for those who don't know about driving up mountains: obviously, you don't go straight up. Rather, roads are cut into the side of the mountain in a zig-zag pattern, so you're kind of driving up the side of the mountain at about a twenty- to thirty-degree angle. Then you hit a small circle to turn back, and do a drive up another twenty-degree road until you hit another turning circle. Switchbacks, they're called, I think.

Mary and Sev live in a charming flat about halfway up the mountain. They're renting as they've just bought some land upon which they're going to build their house in the coming years. We had lots of energy after our train and car rides, so we took a walk about the mountain, and were rewarded with a sunset that spread amazing colours across the clouds and mountain tips of the range we could see: at first a sparkling reddish-orange, slowly transforming into mauve and fuschia. The clouds have to be just right to see those kind of colours. Nearby, a mountain stream blasts water through gigantic piles of rocks. It was very humbling, not to mention loud.

The room in which we slept had a window looked out onto a range of snow-peaked mountains. When you opened the window, you heard the rushing of the mountain stream. The air was fresh and crisp. Combined with what must be stupendous snow and those crazy mountain roads, it was definitely one of those moments where you realize how differently people can live.

The whole village of Bourg St. Maurice is essentially built around winter sports: skiing, snowboarding, hiking, and then the services surrounding it. There's not much else, but with those kind of mountains, there doesn't really need to be. Both Sev and Mary work in the industry, which as she describes, means that she is pretty much incommunicado between December and May. The population of the area swells as visitors rent up all the seasonal places to stay and take vacations in the resorts.

Our week with Mary was one of eating extremely well, drinking a fairly copious amount of good wine, taking several alpine walks, and spending a night in a mountain retreat. It was a fabulous visit, and an excellent opportunity to build some new memories that don't involve biting. We also found out that we share a love for good coffee, and if anything, Mary is even more selective about the quality of her coffee, and clearly better trained at the preparation and tasting of it. I mean I know what I like, and my standards are fairly high, but I think Mary was spoiled down in New Zealand and now she has to suffer through mediocre coffee. I agree with her though, so far: Italians know their coffee. Followed by the Spanish, and then the occasional French outlet that knows its business.

She dropped us off back in Chambery where we embarked on our next leg that took us towards a different range of mountains, the Ardeche, and our first WWOOF visit.