Trip Report

Once work stopped for me on Friday evening, we took a nighttime walking tour of old town Geneva. Here is a plaza down near the lake that we liked because of the funky lights built into the ground. The next morning we met a van at the airport and arrived at Chamonix before lunch.

The inn was up a very steep hill from Chamonix proper. The town and valley is at around 3,000 feet, while the mountains surrounding it top out at over 12,000 feet. Glaciers tumbled down the sides of Mont Blanc as seen from the balcony of our room. We had arranged for "half board" at the inn, which meant we had a delicious formal French dinner from chef Henri every evening (which must not start before 7:30!), and breakfast in the morning.

The main ski area a short walk away from the inn was Le Brevent. Most of it sat on the shoulder of the mountain, in the sunshine at 6-8000 feet facing Mont Blanc. You took a cable car up to get to the starting point. You could go on intermediate runs linked to another ski area (La Flegere) by another cable car, which I did one day. Dara stuck to the blue intermediate runs, while I also took excursions on what they call the "red runs," which are not quite the killer runs, but were a challenge.

On Tuesday we took a couple of cable cars up to the Aiguille du Midi. At the 12,500 foot summit, you can look down on Chamonix and the ski area we had been on (which is below the first ridge line behind Dara). We were light-headed at the top and even had a tough time navigating the staircases. The idea I was going to jump off at this height and take on four hours of snowboarding down a glacier was a bit of a joke after seeing the place in person.

Wednesday was a short day snowboarding for me, meeting Dara down in the town. Thursday was our travel day on three different trains to Paris, including the famous TGV high speed train into Gare de Lyon. I spent much of my time examining the train bathrooms rather than the scenery (an affliction I passed on to Dara for the flight back on Saturday.) However, we had an action packed tourism day in Paris on Friday. We took a tour bus around town seeing the various neighborhoods, and a boat to Isle de la Cite to see Notre Dame. We spent the afternoon enjoying impressionist paintings from Monet, Van Gogh, and the rest of that gang at the beautiful Musee d'Orsee. After escaping uninjured from a fender bender in the taxi on the way, we went up the Eiffel Tower in a snowstorm at night. The next morning started at 4AM to get back home and reality.

I posted all the pictures on Flickr, with titles to tell you what they are if you're interested.