The Savvy Stitch: ARRIVAL - Chamonix Mont Blanc

When we initially started planning this vacation, we seriously contemplated going to Chamonix in the winter. One tiny complication: Noah doesn't know how to ski and was going to have to learn before we went. Which he was going to do. I mean, we had over a year.

But then we realized that if we went in winter, we would only see winter. And I wanted to go back to the sea. So we settled on summer and maybe some other time in winter.

Stock photo of Chamonix in winter

Originally, our trip was going to be one week in Chamonix. Then it grew to a few more days in Nice. Then somehow I added on a whole week going to Switzerland. We ended up with an amazing itinerary giving us two full weeks exploring these amazing places.

The Road to Chamonix

After our amazing breakfast in Nice we took the bus to the airport and picked up our rental car. A new white Citroen. Manual transmission. Noah did all the driving (alas, the real reason I brought him along).

The shortest route from Nice to Chamonix is via Italy and the tunnel du Mont-Blanc; seven miles of scary tunnel under Aiguille du Midi. When you map it out on google it looks like it takes about 4.5 hours. I didn’t realize there was going to be a tunnel though. And it’s at the end, connecting Italy to France.

So we are driving along through Southeastern France, paying tolls every so often; a euro here, a euro there. Driving along the beautiful and completely lovely Mediterranean coast for maybe an hour.

Then we were in Italy and it suddenly the landscape changed immensely. The buildings were all jammed up on on top of the other in a chaotic fashion. We almost immediately turned north though and lost sight of the sea completely. That was a little sad.

As we climbed in altitude we had to go through a lot of tunnels. The tunnels made me really nervous for some reason. However, for some opposite reason Noah kept speeding up, like, really fast through the tunnels. I was kind of a nervous wreck and kept telling him to slow down but he really didn’t listen at all. I was SO GLAD when the tunnels were behind us and we were on a high plateau with no tunnels.

But all the signs were in Italian!

We had pretty much figured out enough French to know how to get around, but now we had a whole new language in road signs.

And instead of $1 - 2 euro tolls, they were $34 - 40 euro tolls! What the heck??!! Must have been all those tunnels. They are probably expensive.

Finally we could see the mountains and WE WERE SO EXCITED!!! We were almost there! We would be at our hotel by 1pm ish and have the whole day ahead of us to explore Chamonix.

Our first view of Mont Blanc.

Then, traffic stopped.

One and a half miles in front of the tunnel through the mountain.

The sign, which looked like a permanent fixture, said it would be 90 minutes to the tunnel. Really? Why?? Was there a crash? What was going on? All the cars were stopped. Dead. Just. Stopped. A couple cars even turned around. I don’t know where they thought they were going if they wanted to go to Chamonix because the other way around was hours and hours.

We saw a lovely Italian village just this side of the mountain.

So we crawled at the slowest absolute pace up to the tunnel.

And here’s the deal. In 1999 there was a horrid crash inside the tunnel and people were trapped and died. So now they meter the traffic. All vehicles have to be 150 meters apart. I learned this as I was using up the last of my phone battery for entertainment while waiting in line for the tunnel. So it took 1.5 hours to go 1.5 miles to get to the tunnel opening. After that it was a breeze.

Stock photo of tunnel entrance in Italy

Oh, and the toll was $50 euro to go through the tunnel.

Finally we emerged on the other side of the tunnel and we were once again in France! Oh, how we love France!

We drove down an extremely steep switchback road and ended up in the most adorable town on the planet.

Somehow Noah found our hotel, Le Faucigny, where we discovered two Atom cars in the extremely limited free parking area. Noah got photos of those. I missed the memo on how awesome Atoms are because I was unimpressed. They were in my parking spot. No photos. Sorry. Too bad.

We were able to park in a temp spot and unload our stuff. Yanika, who spoke perfect English and was so unbelievable friendly, understanding, and helpful, checked us in and helped us lug our bags up to our room.

Then she showed us on the map where to park.

Which was kind of a hike, but that was ok since we planned on walking most everywhere again. Here is a swift flowing river we met on the walk. It runs right through the town.