Chamonix, day one

Yesterday I asked Franck about Nevache: a small town near Briancon that Chloe and I were thinking about driving to this weekend. In the course of the conversation, he very generously offered for us to stay at his place just down the valley from Chamonix, which I gratefully accepted. So after getting the key and instructions last night, we drove to Chamoix today. Unfortunately, last night there was a friendly fire pee accident: Alex, who is almost potty trained, got into our bed, and woke us up around 4 AM with a stream of Alex pee. It turns out that getting peed upon is not a very pleasant way to wake up, and none of us got very much sleep after everything and everyone was clean. So anyway, we slept in a little later than we had planned this morning, and left a little bit later than we planned since we had to wait for the washing machine to finish. As usual, the jerk Tabac owner woke us up with his alarm at 6:00 AM though, like every morning since last October.

Once underway, we headed to Chamonix via Albertville, and stopped at the Beaufort cooperative to load up on cheese, honey and other staples. They had a laser guided hydraulic cheese cutter there, which I was very impressed by.




From Albertville, we drove up through Megeve (I always think of the opening scene in "Charade" when I see the Megeve sign), down through St. Gervais and to the apartment. The apartment was in a huge Chalet, and the kids were overjoyed at all the books and toys around. It took a lot of corralling to prevent them from fully disassembling the place. We quickly got them out of there, to minimize damage, and went to the Parc Animalier de Merlet, which was fantastic. It's an enclosed space on the flanks of the valley with herds of Chamois, mountain goats, deer and other animals. Even better: it has spectacular views of the massif de Mont Blanc. The kids really had a great time and I was not making very much forward progress because I was taking so many pictures, marveling at the mountains and glaciers, trying to identify famous climbs and peering through the binoculars to find well known refuges, like the Refuge des Cosmiques.














From there, we descended to Chamonix for dinner, and went to the Annapurna Indian Restaurant: not recommended at all. Walking to the car, I saw another McLaren MP4-12C -- there must be a sale at the McLaren dealership ("Everything must GO!")or something. I don't get it though -- I went from never having seen a McLaren in my life to seeing two different cars in a week? The other explanation is that the Genevois are starting to go on holiday