Day Twenty Five ~ Monday, May 20

A big day that began with uncertainty, but ended with smiles. Sometimes the best kinds of days.
The morning started off shaky, all the way from an unclear wake-up time, to chefs missing their call time, to payments for the hotel not working properly.
The funny thing about that, Hollis got to witness this fantastic little, elderly Italian lady get fed up with bankers and hang up the phone on someone, in trying to figure out how to get the credit card machine to work. At the end, Hollis was leaving, she gave him a bag of coca-cola lights as a thank you gift.
Finally we made our way to our new hotel (also in Courmayeur) and got settled into our rooms. After decided we were staying in a medieval castle, we packed up for our hike and went outside for lunch. I think our chose lunch spot was the driveway to either a small hotel or someone’s property. The man was very nice however, and even showed us how to recycle properly.
Then we started our hike. We made our way slowly but surely for some reason it didn’t feel as long as yesterday. By the last five minutes (measured on a normal, dry trail) we were trudging through a good 3 to 4 inches of snow.
Once at the top, we spent about a half-hour taking photos of the view and of each other, and throwing snowballs at each other. Then we walked back down. Most of the walk Christina and I enjoyed a wonderful conversation. Upon our return to Courmayeur, we stopped at “the Gelato place” to get some Italian Gelato. In celebration of Chandller’s birthday (I guess), Christina bought the Gelato. I had a triple flavor between Hazelnut, Yogurt and Strawberry. It was indescribable.
Then we finally returned to our hotel. We had a brief relax time before evening meeting and dinner.
For dinner, we went to a fancy (or fancier) Italian restaurant. The pizzas were still big and I got the 4 cheese. Wine was on the table… more about it in the video.

-Joseph Bruner