Geneva to Nice

Observations:

1. The weather has changed from sunny and warm to cool and rainy. Or rather, it was that way at Geneva and Lyon. As we went southward at something like 200mph it changed to rainy and hot. Now in Nice it's cloudy and hot.

2. The TGV goes really, really fast. Wow.

3. I'm sitting at the rental car counter in Nice hoping the Jose will eventually show up.

4. I spent two hours debating world politics, philosophy, pedagogy, soteriology and epistemology with a French professor on the train. I'm pretty sure I won but he wasn't going to admit it. His long pauses after I caught him in logical fallacies and contradictions were enough for me.

4 Addendum. Thank heaven for the chatty French professor, who helped me run to the correct train in Lyon. Six minutes is not enough time to properly catch a train. On this point he was correct.

5. On the most recent leg of my journey, the bus ride from Gare Nice Ville to the Nice Cote-d'Azur Airport, the bus got stuck in traffic in the heart of Nice. A car broke down in the crowded street in front of us and we couldn't move. In rush hour. Traffic backed up for blocks. I heard the guy next to me speaking German and therefore assumed he could speak English, which of course he did. I asked if he would help me push the car out of the way. We went to the bus driver and asked if he would let us out. He had to call for permission but he did so and then, joined by a French good samaritan on the sidewalk, we pushed the little car uphill out of the way. When we got back on board the whole bus started clapping. Like it was heroic or something. I just wanted to get going.

The Jose is here now! RENDEZVOUS CITY!

Prettiest French Village / Town

Not Yvoire. It's Taninges. So far, that is. Taninges may not be on the Lac, but it's prettier and it's a real place.

Mont Blanc

It's the highest cable car in the Alps. It cost over $60 a person but we had to do it. Here's why:

Chamonix quickly recedes into the Alpine skyline.

The Baroness poses in front of a true Alpine glacier.

At the top. One can view successive Alpine ridgelines from the summit.

No view like this anywhere, even from the top of Pikes Peak:

Chamonix from the top.

Then we bumped into another strange discovery, the kind of thing you can never expect. We met a young gentleman from "the Bay Area." After prompting he admited he's from Oakland and he's there to research Mont Blanc for a "rappelling ballet" production. And no, I'm really not making this up. He got his gear together and dangled for about an hour doing ballet poses. Now, he could have easily been pretending, you know, for attention. And he got plenty. But knowing the Bay Area, one must admit there is a strangely plausible absurdity to his explanation. We took this picture from the lower level after we descended a bit, because we weren't allowed to eat our sandwiches at the top.

Clearly, Jose has competition as der Dopeydangler. Notice he's doing ballet poses or something. On the side of an Alpine cliff. At about 14,500 feet. I'm thinking the ballet production would certainly be original. Or stupid. Or tragic. Or all three.

Chamonix

Our unnamed advisor insisted we visit Chamonix. Two reasons: The weather is perfect, hence it is comfortable and the views unobstructed. Also, it is off-season and there are no lines or crowds or traffic jams.

So Chamonix became the goal. Our first stop was the Office de Tourisme. Which was closed. Just like everything else in the Alps from noon to 1430 or 1500. Talk about a siesta! The stop was not a loss, however, as we discovered a beautiful French Alpine chapel, featuring a dude playing the organ and playing it very, very well:

Chamonix, unlike Morzine, is a real city with a tasteful city center. It reminds one of Aspen except for the fact that, well, it's a real city and The Alps are more dramatic than the Rockies. Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps, pictured in the background:

There was also an amazing t-shirt store with some of the coolest embroidered t-shirts I've ever seen. They were so cool my wife and I got a matching set (26 euro each). No, we didn't buy the posing bear in sunglasses. We were tempted, though. My Frau later decided to go back and get another t-shirt for Calvin. I even thought about Al's demand for. T-shirt. But I didn't buy him one.

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...

Chateau de Chillon

The visit to this magnificent castle was intended to be one of the highlights of our trip and it did not disappoint.

Devoted readers of this blog who may not have visited our home, aka Tanglewald im Fuchsberg, may not know that this castle is prominently displayed in a painting above our living room mantle. Others may know that this site was visited some years ago by our older son whilst he was engaged in physics research at nearby Cern. What matters most, however, is that we got to tour the castle and make several significant discoveries.

The first discovery was the meaning of Chillon, which visitors to our home frequently ask about. The tour explains that it is probably a reference to the rock island on which the castle is built. Apparently "chillond" or some such thing in French is a reference to rock, though I can not independently confirm this. But the tour said so! So there it is.

The second discovery is that the castle is even more cool from the inside than it looks from the outside. Like the dungeon, which has pillars and the amazing sight of light reflecting off the lake (lac), through the small battlement openings, onto the ceiling:

Other amazing discoveries are best shown in pictures. The view of Montreux:

Outer walls and inner walls and glacis and other castle stuff with Swiss symbols:

Upper courtyard with ornate window of the Lord of the Castle. He used this window to look out over his underlings. Barely visible on the right is his private stairway to the chapel and the keep. I told my Frau that we need something like this at Tanglewald. Frau, aka The Baroness, said No Way.

Happy Frau / Baroness standing in front of Chateau de Chillon:

As soon as we left there was, alas, one final discovery: a parking ticket. The Baroness, er, my Frau noticed that the ticket was a mistake. It said we had parked for more than three hours, but we had not. How un-Swiss. She spent two hours researching how to appeal a Swiss parking ticket on the internet and discovered--for all practical purposes--you can't! Vive la Suiss! So we'll add it to the cost of doing business or travel or vacances or somesing. C'est la guerre! C'est la vie! C'est stupide.

Yvoire

It claims to be the prettiest village in France. That's possible. It's situated on the shores of Lake Geneva and has its own little harbor and quaint streets. It retains its medieval wall and gate and has a castle on the water:

There are a couple things that make me hesitate. First off, France is a pretty big place and there are lots of villages. Now Yvoire does have scads and scads of pretty flowers, but these contribute to an overall feel that suggests as much Le Tourist Trap as Prettiest Village.

Then there is the Jardin des Cinq Sens. It is promoted as a feature of the village. And it's a really nice garden. It's just...a garden, though. With a theme. The theme is The Five Senses. Pretty edgy. My wife wanted to see, so we paid about thirty bucks and enjoyed quite an experience with our senses.

The first experience was in the Woody Garden, pictured below. This "garden" struck me as a couple trees with ferns and stuff growing underneath. Some other plants, too, with nameplates but I forgot about those when I noticed the mosquitoes. Apparently they were exploring the Woody Garden, too:

We then wandered to the "cloistered" Garden of Taste. This delightful area had edible plants except for two things: We were instructed to "feast with the eyes only", like that makes sense, and some of the plants were poisonous! Garden of Taste, indeed.

It was in the Garden of Smell, or Sight, or Something, that I began to notice the bees. My wife was wandering and reading the signs. I decided to patiently wait for her by sitting on the benches. The bees made their presence known. This continued through the rest of the garden. I found it annoying. The bees did too, apparently.

We also saw The Garden of Hearing. The brochure says, "An inaccessible and symbolic space that is open to the skies. Just close your eyes..." What on earth?!?!? I closed my eyes and heard the children from the Ecole and the bells from the church. I guess that makes it profound or something. But I could close my eyes and hear those things from anyplace, even if I decide it's "symbolic". Duh.

So eventually we left. The tour took us through a room which explained how important the bees are to the garden. Also, it explained how our "contributions" helped continue the vision of the founder of the garden, Baron Francois Bouvier d'Yvoire (1834-1918). All of this was supposed to be inspirational, I guess. I was just glad to escape the bees.