Fruitière et Fromagerie

You aren't in truly in France until you have baguettes.

A wet Sam after the first training in the rain.

Bonjour! We are currently enjoying life in the Savoie Region in France. Lots of running and napping, with some cheese and bread eating on the side. My (Sam) big accomplishment of the day was not falling sleep after the morning training. I think I am finally adjusting to jetlag. This is, of course, after we slept in 75 minutes after our alarms yesterday. So far our first two days have been quite similar. Wake up, enjoy breakfast downstairs, go out training, come back and eat lunch, try not to fall asleep, head out for a second training, then come back for homemade dinner. Unfortunately, the weather hasn't been great - too much rain and around 50-60°F. The first day we set out into the forest we were sitting in the car, listening to the rain fall. Luckily, we met another orienteer here, Marika from Finland, and having someone else was motivation to get out and get wet.

The woods were... challenging. You seriously have to have a death wish in order to run quickly. There were large holes and crevices that you could fall down if you weren't paying attention or if you slipped. Running was out of the question for the most part, so Ross and I just hiked along mostly. Navigation didn't seem so bad, but that was mostly because we were moving so slowly and stopping frequently. Luckily, we have since run on maps that don't require constant vigilance to ensure you don't fall down a 7 foot hole lined with cliffs.

The place where we are staying, La Fruitière d'Arith, is great. We have breakfast every morning and home cooked dinner every evening. The first night there was a fantastic plate of cheese.

We couldn't get a picture before it was mostly gone!

We heard that the cheese was made in Lescheraines, right down the road. Today we set out to visit our first fromagerie. After a few wrong turns (which you realize right away because there are a limited number of road up here), we found Cooperative Laitiere de Lescheraines. There were many varieties of cheeses inside and it was hard to choose - especially when the woman working there didn't speak english. In broken french we ordered two types of cheese, indicating with hand gestures that we wanted small amount. We ended up with a delicious bit of Tome de Chèvre and Gruyère le Margériaz.

Tome de Chèvre

Gruyère - The wheel this came off of was ginormous.

The days have been chilly and rainy, although we had a pleasant afternoon today. We ran 20 minutes up a trail to beautiful woods and a short sprint course, where I think we may have broken 10m/k (I'll have to load my garmin to check). Granted, it was a 1.9k wood sprint on a 1:5000 map so I could actually read the contour detail. When it's not cloudy the views here are fantastic. Very much French mountain towns.

Tomorrow we head to a new map further north and then we plan to spend the afternoon in Annecy, the tourist town by the lake. We even have a sprint map there, so we may get to do some actual running (instead of hiking).

Au revoir!