Slow week & more climbing

This past week was very quiet, especially since Joe wasn't around to instigate going out. He was in the states all week at his 10-year high school reunion and then to a conference in Milwaukee. He even squeezed in a couple days in Chicago with Jacqui and Amine before they headed to the conference. They even went to Gibson's Steakhouse...I'm so jealous!! Especially since I only got to eat out for fondue this week. Adrian's friends from college were visiting, so we went out for fondue Monday night and then to Lutry Tuesday night. The rest of the week was very tame... stayed home most of the time and watched 3 movies and cleaned up the apartment.

On Saturday, Stephan, Rikki (a PhD student in Joe's lab) and I went climbing in Collombey. It wasn't the prettiest of places, with tons of rock dumped on the site and a view of a power plant, but it was in the shade all day long... very nice to know about in the future if it's ever super hot. It wasn't too easy to get to either (train & 2 buses) and the climbs aren't used often, as seen with the plants everywhere and lots of spiders. On one of the runs, there was a huge nest-like thing of orange-bodied daddy long legs... just hanging there bouncing in the wind. Super creepy, but I managed not to freak out too much, only came off the wall for a minute or so to get over the initial shock before climbing around them. Stephan even warned us since he climbed first, but I wasn't expecting that many of them. And on another run, I had to swat one off the wall because it kept trying to get into the handhold I wanted to use. After the spider runs, we moved to a different part of the wall and met these really nice english-speaking climbers. Turns out that they run a treking/climbing/alpine excursion company, explains why they were so good at climbing! They were so nice, they even drove us back to the train station, which saved us so much time with the buses.

-here I am at the top of the spider run. I'm so tiny up there!

-here's Stephan climbing his first 6a. (6a is the difficulty grade, I've only climbed 4s and some 5s)

The rest of the pictures are on flickr if you want to see more action shots of our bums.