Tour Du Mont Blanc - Day 4

Friday, 5 July 2019

Day four started with a delicious looking hotel breakfast which we mostly couldn't take advantage of as we were still so full from the day before! We then caught the local bus to the Skyway Cable Car which went up to the highest point in Italy - 3466m. 

It was good fun and there were lots of activities to do at the halfway station, but it was also hideously expensive - our family ticket cost 164 euros. We briefly toyed with the idea of getting the linking cable cars which would carry us all the the way down to Chamonix on the other side of Mont Blanc but it worked out to be $834 AUD - i.e. as much as a return flight to Perth! so we didn't do that. 

On the cable car back down to earth Jon worked out how to book seats on the much cheaper (15 euro) bus to Courmayeur just in time for it to turn up at the cable car base station, thus avoiding a boring 2 hour wait in town for the next one.   Nice one Jon! - his competence has saved us a few times so far on this trip.  The journey back to Chamonix through the Mont Blanc tunnel was uneventful but kind of cool to be right under the mountain we'd just been so high up on.

Back in Chamonix we had our standard lunch then set off on the 8km walk back to the car at Les Houches.  The walk was generally pretty and we almost avoided the downpour but it got us just as we got to the car.

Then we jammed our backpacks into the car with our regular luggage and headed off to Albertville, which was our way of avoiding the 46euro toll for driving straight back through the Mont Blanc tunnel. The rain pelted down along the way, and the driving was really windy and tricky as some of the regular roads were closed.  Jon drove like a champion, and we arrived at 6pm and promptly exploded our packs and bags onto the grass at the campground.

Our last dinner in France was sausages for the kids & Jon, 2 minute noodles for me.   Fancy.