A Nice Escalade For A Sunday Afternoon

Today I went rock climbing/hiking with Benoît and Adélie at Sixt Fer a Cheval, a small town about an hour away from Bonneville, it is not very far from Mt. Blanc.  It took us about two hours to get to the top of the climbing site, but only forty five minutes to come down.

The beginning of the climb was nice, tranquille, but then the vertical climbing started and I went very slowly and tried not to look down. We were all attatched, the ropes and everything was secure and the station had wires that we could attatch to.  Everything was going alright, until we got to a bridge, a hanging bridge.  Adélie was half-way across the bridge when I came on and we started laughing about how it reminded us of the scene in Shrek where Donkey and Shrek are on the bridge going to the castle, and Shrek shakes the bridge while Donkey is scared to death.  We reproduced the scene in French on the bridge except that none of us were scared.

I looked down only to see the beatiful view that we had of the mountains and the small town, but other than that I did not look down at the large rock that I was in the middle of climbing.  There were some scary moments but I came out of it just fine.

It was a really nice experience that I have never had before and don't know when I will have the chance to do it again.  This was the first time that I have done rock climbing outside of the high school gym's rock wall, and the rock walls at REI.

After the climb we went to see the Cascade de Rouget,the largest waterfall in all of Europe, it was a short ten minutes away from where we climbed.  It was very beautiful and it cooled us off very nicely, after three hours in the sun, it was 28C (83F) again today!  It was a really beautiful day and Anne said one of the last nice weekends to go climbing, because we have concerts almost every weekend with the Harmonie and after May, it is going to get really hot.

I had a really nice time and this will be added to my collection of amazing experiences in France!

I have a long day ahead of me at school tomorrow, I am going to head off!

Bonne Journée tout le monde!