When we arrived in Chamonix there was a lot of cloud cover and it was raining so we couldn't initially see the famous Chamonix needles. After a quick bite to eat and a short walk around town looking at the outdoor gear shops (so Mai could get her fix!), we were keen to get up to the Aiguille du Midi on the cable car to get a head start on our acclimatisation.
It's a pretty amazing situation for anyone planning a journey into the alpine realm to have a cable car that can take you up to an altitude of 3842m with absolutely no physical effort whatsoever! We planned to utilise this very handy facility to maximise our acclimatisation over the course of the next two days (which actually turned out to be 3 days as we had our dates mixed up!) spending as much time up the top as possible. It was definitely a gradual improvement with us both feeling pretty out of breath the first couple of times, however slowly but surely we both started feeling better each time to the point where I was trying to do as many laps of the stairs around the complex as possible to try and sneak in a bit of excercise (that's when we weren't sitting around drinking hot chocolate of course!).
The first two days the weather was pretty grey and cloudy, but then it all cleared up for the third day and we got to enjoy the amazing mountain views from both the valley floor and the Aiguille du Midi complex and got our first good look at Mt Blanc ...... looks pretty high ...... but doable!
