Spring Break, Part X - The Voyage Home

Kari:

Have I in any way succeeded in selling you on the idea of tourism to Switzerland or France?

Saturday March 27, 2004

Saturday was our final full day on Spring Break. We took it nice and slow in Chambery. There was a street market day which is always a treat for the foodie and photographer in me.

Olives! I confess I have become an olive snob. Yes, I'll still occasionally eat them out of a can but I prefer to buy them a la carte from buckets of them still sitting in their brine.



Cheese! I always thought of Swiss cheese as being the cheese with holes you buy in plastic packages in slices. Well, a lot of different cheeses have holes and they come in a variety of pungencies.



The kids and adults were drawn to the cute fluffy little animals in one section of the street market.



Yum... pastries!



We did buy about 1/2 pound of escargot. It was pre-seasoned with a pesto-like butter sauce. We sauteed them and they taste kind of like clams. Sorry, no photos of that event!

We thanked our hosts, Christin and Mike with hugs and promises to keep in touch.

We headed north to Geneva to catch our Sunday flight. We decided to go for one last tourist site. The Abbaye d'Hautecome on the Western shore of the Luc Le Bourget.



The Abbaye had its start in 1100s!



We got into Geneva and took one last look around. It was a sunny but chilly weekend day.

Looking around these streets, you half expect somebody with a trench coat to step up and ask you for the secret password!

Alas, I wasn't approached by any Syndey Bristow (Jennifer Garner's character in Alias) graduate student-bank employee-spy persons.

Will our blog get more hits if I plug Jennifer Garner's movie "13 Going on 30"?


In the film, Garner plays Jenna Rink who finds her 13 year old self as her 30 year old self. Comedy and heartache ensues. I liked the movie. Garner is always kicking or shooting somebody in Alias; thus, it was a pleasure to see how funny and charming she can be in a comedy. By the way, Higher being Instapundit liked it too as he saw it with the Insta-Wife and Insta-Daughter. So if he can blog about it, so can I!

But I've gone off on a tangent!

Here a picture below of a street in the "spy" movie set of a city, Geneva.



We walked out on the pier to the Jet d'Eau which we saw back on day 1.



A beautiful swan cruising Lake Geneva.



We had dinner in Annemasse, France. We walked around the little town and found an Italian style restaurant that looked somewhat busy. We looked at our menus and as usual it was not in English. We could figure out most items but the lady a the other table noticed we were having trouble. She was Chinese! So she looked at the menu and tried to explain what the items were. At times she would lapse into French and other times into Mandarin and then she would remember to speak in English! I am amazed how people can know more than one language.

Our hotel was on the French side of the border in the suburbs. As you might guess the price for a hotel in Geneva proper would have been 2 to 3 times more money.

We had two final adventures on Sunday March 28, 2004! First, we started driving to the airport and looked at our watches, looked at the clocks on the highway, looked at our watches... yikes, we were ONE hour late! It turns out that in Europe they switch to daylight savings time one week before we do!

All of a sudden we were running a little short on time. Then we had to hunt for a gas station to fill the rental car up. We found one and had trouble getting the thing to accept one of our credit cards! Well, eventually we got the car fueled and pulled into the airport.

Whew!

Anyway, we got on the plane and had an uneventful flight back home. On the flight, I became hooked on the FOX show 24 with Keifer Sutherland as Jack Bauer an agent in CTU = counter terrorism unit, a fictional US Federal Agency. On my seat screen I saw the middle episodes of the First Season. We landed in Newark and Leonard caught a flight to DC while Harold and I caught a flight to Los Angeles.

And that is the story of my spring break!

Rene

P.S. If you stumbled onto this travelogue mid-stream, click here to go back to day one! Enjoy!!