Europe 2013 has begun!
We decided to fly out in the evening so we would arrive at a decent hour. The flight from Ottawa to Frankfurt wasn't bad at all. We had a nice meal once we were up to cruising altitude and then we both settled in to watch a movie. Sony headphones with intelligent noise cancelling technology were amazing. I picked up a few sets from Dell when they had one of their Dell Days events. First I put them on without turning them on. The sound was great, but when I switched them on they became awesome. It was like someone turned off the jet engines. After the movie I settled in to sleep. Jo did the spastic worm all the way to Frankfurt.
Frankfurt airport is huge and you can buy almost anything you can imagine there. We thought it was a little funny that you could have a frankfurter in Frankfurt. We managed to find our next gate and then Jo had a little nap before the short flight to Lyon.
Lyon is a great little airport to fly into. You can rent a car or hop on the train and get anywhere you want to in no time flat. We picked up our rental car and hit the road. I had plugged all the routes into my GPS before leaving home, but we decided to take a more scenic route to Chamonix instead of taking the toll highways. A quick change of the GPS settings and it recalculated a route to avoid toll highways. This added about an hour to the drive but it was so worth it!
We drove through some really scenic little villages along the way and spotted some of the roads that we had watched the Tour de France riders on a few weeks before. The Gorge d'Arly was especially spectacular and it was a blast to drive with a sporty car.
We arrived in Chamonix around 7:00 and had no problem finding our hotel at all. It's a great little hotel that caters to mountaineers. We have a balcony and we look right at the glacier on Mont Blanc from our room. We unpacked them wandered around town and got a baguette with cheese and meat for a snack before calling it a night. Just after we got back to our room the skies opened up and we were treated to a spectacular mountain storm. The thunder echoed down the valley and it sounded like a cannon. Lightning storms in the mountains are our fav....as long as you're in a nice warm room and not up on the mountain.
Leaving Ottawa at night makes for a really long travel day, but by the time you're ready to settle in it's already the next night so you adjust to the new time zone pretty quickly. Well that's day 1 in the books. Time to drift off as the storm echoes up and down the valley. Bonne nuit Chamonix.
Pics and adventures starting tomorrow :-)
