Southern France & “Hiking” in the Alps

May 26, 2012: Eventually we were on the road again and this time we made it to France. We got in late in the evening and chose to pitch our tent at a campground just outside the walls of Avignon. Tired and hungry, we walked into the city and strolled around the cobblestone pathways trying to find a good place to eat. Unfortunately everything just seemed way too expensive and we settled for a restaurant on the main plaza. We probably should have turned back since there were photos and English translations on the menu, but we stuck around and soon enough we were taken in by our first tourist trap of the entire trip. I guess it had to happen at some point since we were pretty spoiled by good food and experiences up until then. I ordered a fish dish and Chris ordered duck – both items came out unseasoned and with the rubbery texture of something frozen and thawed a few times before being and microwaved. This led to our first French altercation. Had this happened in the US, we probably would have gotten our meals comped with very little argument. In this situation we eventually got Chris’s meal comped, but not without a scene. Chris alerted the server that his meal was not edible (this was an understatement) and the waiter proceeded to theatrically blame him, loudly. We found it odd that the server chose to do this in French when moments earlier he used perfect English to talk us into taking a seat at his restaurant to begin with. So long story short, we left Avignon with a bad taste in our mouths, but we did manage to enjoy some of the other small towns around the Provence region and try some Côtes du Rhône wine before driving on towards the French Alps.

The original plan was to go to Grenoble and find a place to go hiking. Once we got there though, we realized that it was actually a pretty bustling city and we were really overwhelmed by the tram cars and super confusing roads. It seemed like a fun college town, but we weren’t on foot and decided it would be best to get out of downtown and find somewhere more scenic. Chris and I eventually made our way to a campground called Les Sept Lacs (the Seven Lakes) and thought it would be promising, but it turned out that the advertised lakes were several miles apart and none of them were very easy to get to. Reminded me of the time we went looking for waterfalls in Marble Falls, TX – I hate misleading names! But even with no lake, the campground was still really nice. It felt kind of like Sound of Music, we set up on a patch of soft grass and enjoyed cheese and bread while looking out onto a picturesque hillside.

The campground manager was a nice man who spoke no English, but we managed to talk with him in French about his younger days when he had mountain biked to the top of a snow covered peak. He showed us the crampons that we’d need if we wanted to hike to the lake (imagine strapping razor sharp ice picks to your shoes) but we explained that unfortunately this would be a little more intense than anything we had time for. Apparently we had arrived in between seasons. All the ski resorts around that area were shut down, but it was still too early for the outdoor enthusiasts they expected for the summer. And even though it was comfortable and warm at the foothills where we were staying, it was apparently still quite frozen at the higher elevations. When we asked where to go hiking, he gave us a couple hand-drawn maps, but all of the trailheads were a bit of a drive from where we had camped. Another weird experience about camping in France: they don’t camp in parks. National parks are meant for protecting wildlife so camping isn’t allowed – if you want a true wilderness experience, I’m not really sure what you would have to do. So we drove 30 min on winding roads through tiny villages to the trailhead he suggested and once we started walking up the mountain, we noticed that the trail was unusually wide.  After getting farther ahead, we realized that we were on a snowless ski trail. There were deep tractor tracks everywhere and all the trees that weren’t cleared were very sparse. We checked the map and were sure we were in the right place, the trails were marked easy, medium, and hard… perhaps in the same context as green, blue, black, and double black? Frustration kicked in. This is where a local outdoor enthusiast suggested we go hiking? I was disappointed since I had envisioned us meandering through dense woods or pristine wildflower fields with the Alps as a backdrop. Unfortunately all the pictures I had based this off of were taken in Switzerland, but we just didn’t have the time to go all the way out there.  We figured the French side of the Alps might be just as pretty, but unfortunately our experience didn’t confirm this. Maybe we were in the wrong area? As we climbed the barren mountain, I began to profoundly appreciate the park system that we have in the good old USA.  There certainly isn’t a shortage of undisturbed places to go hiking. Even the trails in the middle of the desert have character, wildlife, and natural beauty.

The mountain “hike” left me feeling way more fatigued than it should have. But it meant for some sound sleep in preparation for driving to Aix-les-Bains the next day.