it is customary on the TMB to say hello to each person you pass in the local language. And today we switched from Bonjour to Ciao as we crossed from France into Italy.

We woke up to everything wet and very cold this morning. It rained during the night and the temperature dropped into the low 30s. The worst part was packing up everything wet from the day before and having to put back on my cold, wet clothes from yesterday. However, we managed to do so and began our hike for the with a one hour excursion off of our planned hike in order to climb to a peak that would give us a 360 degree view. It was a hard climb for me first thing in the morning but the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the view from the top was stunning.

From there we began our planned hike for the day which took us down and up several steep mountains. For me it was really an exhausting day as we hiked 9.5 hours, reached peaks over 9,000 feet tall, walked more than 34,000 steps and finally made our way to a camp site in a small Italian village Italy filled with people on summer holidays. We did get our first views today of Mont Blanc as well.

Daniel and I just had our first hot meal, pizza and salad, since Tuesday. Delicious. We met another guy hiking the TMB, Markus, from Guatemala, and had a nice discussion with him. We will leave tomorrow morning and make our way to Courmayeur.