A meal as enormous as Mont Blanc in the shadow of Europe's highest peak
An older British couple shared my four-seater gondola for the long, dangling ride back from Mont Blanc's Aiguille du Midi to Punta Helbrunner. This is the world's longest cable car without any supporting pilons. Instead, an impressive set of cables stretches horizontally between two rocky peaks about halfway along intersect the main cables and help keep us from plummeting to our deaths.
At one point, when we were hanging roughly three kilometers over the canyon-sized cracks in the Mer de Glace glacier, they nervously asked me whether there were any U.S. military bases in the area, a clear reference to the Aviano catastrophe a few years ago when a hot-dogging pilot clipped the line of a cable car over in northeastern Italy, killing all 29 people inside.
On the way back down, I spent half an hour relaxing and sunning in the scrabbly (but beautiful up close) botanical gardens half-way down the Italian side.
A never-ending dinner in Entrèves
Back down in Entrèves, I finished washing out my laundry in the sink and hung it on my wrap-around Alpine balcony to dry some during dinner. I strolled to the other end of the village and to the Maison de Fillipo and one of the most remarkable dinners I have ever had.
