Into the Alps...to Morzine

We have spent a day in the city of Geneve. Another day driving along the shore of Lac Leman (Lake Geneva) to Chateau de Chillon. It was time to get up into the Alps. We had no specific destination, but had heard that Morzine was pretty. And famous. And nearby. So we headed out.

Now, I don't have any pictures of Morzine because it wasn't very interesting and it was kind of famous for being famous. There were, however, some picturesque Alpine villages along the way. It was probably a village like this where Regy's ancestors deveoped the French Alpine goat line.

More to the point, Morzine was also empty. We went to the Office de Tourisme and some guy basically walked in and said, "Hey! You're Americans! What are you doing here?!?" It was a strange and fortuitous encounter. He said Morzine is usually very crowded (it wasn't), that there were often a lot of Brits (there weren't) and virtually never Americans there (what were we, Moravian?). And he knew about this because he's lived in Morzine off and on for thirty years.

There was a lot more to this story, but let us focus on the fortuitous part. He gave us very specific advice about how to explore the Alps. It was advice we decided to take, leading us into pristine Alpine valleys and villages and to...