23rd of August - France - To Saint-Gervais-les-Bains

So, today we checked out of our tiny studio apartment in La Toussuire and headed off towards the north. Staying in a private, albeit very small apartment was quite nice actually. No one to take account of. Just us. We've had a couple of nice and relaxed evenings watching movies and yesterday we topped it with some wine and snacks.
We got up really early today in order to have time to clean the apartment before check-out time. During our stay there we couldn't help but wonder if it could be an investment to purchase a small apartment like that and rent it out during the ski season. Who knows...

We took the small (toll free) roads towards the higher mountains. First by mistake, the GPS was set to toll free and I was wondering a bit over not being led to the highway. After a while we figured that we might as well continue on those roads. Its not like we were in any kind of a hurry.
It took more than two hours to reach Saint-Gervais-les-Bains and still we were too early for check-in. It was really warm, arriving in this area. The temperature was close to 30 degrees Celsius. A bit more than in La Toussuire where I had actually been a bit frozen. The evening temp there had been as low as 14 degrees.
Well, instead of sitting around and waiting for check in, we decided to go for a drive. We ended up at a restaurant, Le Four, where we had lunch. Ben wasn't very hungry and had a salad, while I myself went for some grilled meat.

Afterwards we found the local Decathlon, which was quite huge compared to the ones we visited previously. This one was fittingly enough called Mountain Store and also was surrounded by the silhouettes of the alps in all directions.
We looked through every single isle, tried jackets, shorts and climbing shoes and a slack line they had in the climbing section of the store. I've decided to post order a pair of new climbing shoes at some point (my club is rebuilding at the moment and is closed for now). We bought some carabiners. You can never have too many of those ;)
I would've bought huge amounts of stuff now if I could've transported all of it back home, but our luggage was already almost at maximum weight on arrival to France, so some patience is warranted.
We had a coffee at the  store's diner too before finally heading back to Saint-Gervais-les-Bains for our check-in.

Our place for the stay in this area is a hostel, Gite les Cristaux, with a fairly large room, shared kitchen and a view of the hills through the windows.

After "moving in" with all our luggage and stuff we made some dinner and then headed off to see a near by bolted cliff wall with some easier grade multi-pitch routes. It's located in Chamonix. As we drove there, we watched the ever looming Mont Blanc massif closing in ahead of us. It's a fascinating mountain. The visible top, Aguille du midi, is a full kilometer lower than the actual top of the massif.

The cliff we were going to has routes of around 60+ meters. There were several people climbing and practicing there. One group was using the longest rope I've ever seen. Must've been 100 m long... The girl climbing looked tiny on the huge wall.

Tomorrow we'll be heading back there. Today turned out to be a genuine resting day. No climbing, no hiking and hardly even any walking. I bet I haven't walked more than a hundred meters today and most of that within Decathlon... :-)