The Tour of de Injured Joints
Trip Start
Apr 11, 2009
1
40
Trip End
Aug 06, 2009
Chamonix, Rhône-Alpes, France
Monday, August 3, 2009
Two years ago, all five of us managed to meet up in St Bees Head, Cumbria, and walk across the north of England, two hundred miles, to Robin Hood's Bay in North Yorkshire. It was muddy, long, hard, and rained constantly. It was also the best trip we have ever taken as a family. We spent the nights curled up in pubs with well deserved beers, and the days making sure Mom didn't kill herself.
Last year, my father became fixated on another walk - the Tour de Mont Blanc. It's a 120 mile loop around the Mt Blanc Massif. It is, to be fair, shorter than the Coast to Coast, so I suppose that's why he thought we might all be able to do it uninjured. But that 120 mile length doesn't count the thousands and thousands of meters vertical involved. On one day this week, we climbed 1,700m, over a mile, up. It's roughly the equivalent of climbing the Empire State Building almost five times. For some, namely my brother and sister, this is a peice of cake. Sure, they get a bit tired, but after all, these are people who know the comparative nutritional values of five brands of energy bars, and can have long, seemingly engrossing, conversations about stretching. They are not me. And they are certainly not my mother.
In England, my brother once described my method of climbing mountains as "like a penguin with greased feet" and said that walking behind my mother was like walking behind a dozen eggs about to break. And that wasn't even in the alps.
Since we began this trip, at least six of our ten knees have had near total breakdowns, I have decided that there must be unhealed fractures in my toes (nothing else could, I have decided, explain the pain) and Teal has come in regularly from the day's trials energetically planning her afternoon's run and perhaps a quick hike before dinner. Four days in, Nicholas repeated a mysterious injury to his knee that first happened skiing this winter. His health insurance doesn't kick in until he's spent $10,000, and as an actor in New York, he has decided that a far more convenient way to deal with this injury than medical care is to rest, take a lot of IB Profin, and drink. This actually is how he deals with most things, including, say, the spot on his shoulder that spontaniously bleeds when you touch it (really, it's cool, check it out next time you see him) and every other ailment that falls short of an actual bone breaking skin. He and Mom have turned this into a tour of Mt Blanc's public transit systems, and they're quite the experts. Dad and I have managed to muddle through, not least to preserve the reputations we achieved on the Coast to Coast as the most unlikely of finishers, though we began cheating on the downhills two days ago, and have since taken minor warnings of storms as reasons to cancel any possibility of taking a high route.
But despite the pain, the leg-burnding climbs and toe-busting descents, my mother having to sleep without her six pillows, and the verbal lashing Teal and I recieved from a sleepwalking Brit, it's been a great trip. The family Brown has once again proved the lesson we learned in England: if you walk long enough, and hard enough, you are allowed to eat as much cheese as you want. And that's truly what makes a vacation worth taking.
