That weekend that Claire hitch-hiked down to Geneva to steal things from her old SGP apartment.
Thursday evening prior, at about 7 o’clock in the evening we received a spontaneous e-mail from Claire saying that she would be in Geneva in less than 24 hour’s time: there is a Prevessin brai on Friday, but if we didn’t want to take part “we better come up with a better plan.”
So we had our orders, took stock and store, and we knew what the weekend would most likely entail: a trip to Chamonix, that wonderful valley. Come Saturday morning, Dan’s Renault gathered us all (Dan, Claire, myself (Danny), and Kevin) and we head for Chamonix, making two pit stops along the way:
- Au Vieux Campeur for some eye candy, cheap machine coffee, and climbing shoes for Kevin
- Carrefour to pick up sandwich items, water, and bananas
We head to La Joux for some nice crag climbing. Both Claire and I in the past weeks had had some practice lead-climbing and so here we continued upping our skills on that front while Dan watched his climbing pupils and Kevin took to the rock for the first time.
Right, on to the sandwich front.
Claire made for herself a healthy spread of hummus on pumpernickel slices topped off with Seeberger’s (any other distributor of dried items would be blasphemy at this point) apple chips (gutenappelchipenz). If memory serves correctly it was eaten open-faced – the thing was in Claire’s belly too quickly for me to commit to memory such details let alone make proper photographic documenation.
For myself I made a throwback sandwich: a plain baguette torn and split by hand, with pieces of 99% Lindt chocolate, slices of dried sausage, a thick slice of Comte cheese (rind inclusive), and some climbing chalk to top it off.
Dan, with climbing, belaying, and making sure no one was falling off the rock, was, as per usual, left starved until the climbing was done. On our walk out of the woods from the cragging wall and entering a field and wood stock-pile of a nearby warm-window-lit farm home we stopped to watch the evening set upon Mont Blanc and let Dan make his sandwich: a full quarter of a block of cheese (Brie?) and slices of dried sausage all between two giant pieces of bread. It was a wonderfully big sandwich and required further inspection:
Arrving back in SGP late in the evening hungry and scraped up from the rock, we made pasta at my apartment utilizing my new French-points-to-the-max cheese block scraper. It was a nice day.
