The summer school is pretty intensive, but if you take a lunch bag instead of sitting down for lunch, there is enough time for a nice hike. These two photos are taken on one of those hikes:

On Saturday we had the afternoon off, and I took the cable car up with a few people. It was a beautiful day, and flowers everywhere, very pretty!

Me with Anastasia and Claire, and one of the views along the way…

In the photo on the left we are standing in front of the Mont Blanc!

While on that hike, Paul called me to say he was coming to Les Houches! It’s less than 1.5 hours to drive from Verbier (where he’s taking his paragliding course) to Les Houches, and we both had the day off on Sunday so this worked our very nicely. I waited for him at the bottom of the cable car, and we went to Chamonix for dinner. A very touristy place, but pretty too! And it was the 21st of June, which is Fête de la Musique in France – so there were people playing music everywhere and we enjoyed strolling through the streets and listening to the different groups.

On Sunday (today) we took the cable car again, and from there we walked to the next cable car. It was mostly downhill and not a very difficult walk, but it was very warm so we took it easy and spent lots of time taking photos. The amount of flowers up there is just amazing, see here…

These photos are taken in front of the glacier coming down from the Mont Blanc, great views!

This is one of the stops of the Mont Blanc railway, a small train that goes up to 2300 m. We later climbed a bit higher, and on the right you can see the spectacular view of the valley towards Chamonix.

And here’s a photo of Paul and the crazy car he took… He was going to rent a car but the rental company was closed and then one of the instructors offered him his car for the weekend… a very fun car in this weather!

Paul left for Verbier again in the afternoon, and we start lectures and tutorials again tomorrow. There’s 5 more days left in the summer school, we finish on Friday after lunch. I’ll hope to have time for a few more hikes though 🙂