Tour du Mont Blanc 1

The Tour Du Mont Blanc, or TMB, is the oldest and most popular long-distance walk in Europe and takes one around the Mont Blanc massif in France, Italy, and Switzerland to admire the Alps’ highest mountain from all angles. Except for the German Hexenstieg in the Harz mountains, this was to be my first long walk in continental Europe.

We had planned the walk in early 2020, and, I’m embarassed to admit, paid an agency to plan an itinerary and book our accommodation. I had assumed we’d have to call French, Italian and Swiss refuges to book, and wasn’t confident in my language skills. Later it turned out that there is a website which makes it extremely easy to plan an itinerary and book refuges and hotels, all in English (or French, German, Spanish, Italian) - d’oh.

I was worried about my fitness. Since moving close to the office, I wasn’t doing much regular exercise anymore - I certainly noticed the absence of my daily cycle commute. The TMB climbs one or more alpine mountain passes every day, and appararently the total ascent over the 170 km of the trail exceeds that of Mount Everest from sea level (10,000 m). If you don’t take the cable cars, that is. But I didn’t know about those then, so the plan was to train a bit with regular outings in the Scottish Highlands.

And then a pandemic and lockdown struck, and we pretty much wrote off the holiday and said goodbye to our deposit.