Day Twenty Four ~ Sunday, May 19

A good, big day. The weather was kind of crappy at points, but held off at the right times to keep us from going to the sports center and make us go on a walk.
The morning started late, as usual here in this hotel. As a chef, I had to be ready by 9:45 to go with the other chefs and Hollis for a food shop. While we were indecisive at first, it was a successful shop with some new additions, such as pesto.
The walk to and from the shop, the weather was just amazing. When we all stepped outside, we all made some exclamation. The mountains were unbelievably beautiful. They were razor sharp against the sky and had more snow cover on the peaks than we had seen yet. Parts of them you just could not see any rock. Just the pure, smooth white. The sky was also very, very blue.
We came back from the shop and just hung out for a little bit. We were waiting until 11:30 to start prepping lunch and also to see if the predicted 50% chance of rain was going to roll in.
We started to prep lunch in the lobby, and then were asked to move it outside. By this point, some serious clouds were definitely starting to roll in from behind the mountain range. We decided to go hiking anyway.
I remember Charlotte and a couple others were hesitant about wearing shorts, laughing about the fact that there are many things that could fall out of the sky, the less likely being hail. Well… guess what fell out of the sky on the hike up?
Right in the middle of the hail storm, we made it to a restaurant overlooking a vista. We took shelter under it while Christina told us how eating hair reminded her of eating Dippin’Dots!
Once the hair subsided, we pushed on. Another 30 minutes or so, we hit snow that was so thick and slick we decided to heard down a little early, so we would have less snow to navigate on the way down. It was tricky, and definitely slowed us down, but eventually we made it back to the restaurant.
I had a hot chocolate, like the vast majority of our group. It was delicious. It was much thicker than what we get in the states. People describe it as chocolate bars simply melted down to a liquid. As for this specific hot choco, we believe it was dark chocolate with milk mixed in.
But then we continued down. We made our way back to the hotel, tired by happy. We had our usual evening meeting early, and then made our way to Ristorante du Tunnel for another group dinner. I tried the 4 Fromagi pizza and was very happy.

-Joseph Bruner