St. Laurent du Pont

The five of us went on an impromptu trip to St. Laurent du Pont, a little village at the foot of the Chartreuse Mountains to visit Pierre's sister. Finally stuck my shoes in some real snow.

Bastille: Take #3

I had (yet another) day off today, so I decided to climb up the Bastille again. This time I wandered around for about two hours on the trails that continue up past the main Bastille hike. It was gorgeous. I still can't believe all this is just a half hour tram ride away.

First hike in the Alps!

I finally went on a hike the other day with a few other assistants! It was great, but about halfway up it started to drizzle. As we made our way up and through the snow and then started to come back down, it slowly progressed into a full on downpour. Eventually we decided to get off the trail and veer onto a rode where we hitched a ride with a nice old man who let all five of us squeeze into his little car, and drove our freezing butts into town. So it was a little cold and wet, but it was great :) Next time I won't ignore the weather report though.

You can't see it, but once we got to the top it was covered in snow

I was a little bummed we missed the great view, there was so much fog we couldn't see anything! 

Made it to the top!

Annecy

Five assistants and I took a day trip over to Annecy. It's an incredibly picturesque little town a couple of hours away by train. As always the other assistants were great and overall it was really fun: lots of laughing and talking and ice cream. Although I was a bit disappointed: as pretty as Annecy is, once you walk around the old part of the city and the lake, there isn't much to do, so we ended up leaving earlier than we had planned. But even so it was really fun, and like I said, beautiful place.

Lyon

I went to Lyon with five other TAPIF-ers yesterday. We didn’t really plan it out too much, which wasn’t surprising since we had decided to go the night before. 

Up there you see Notre Dame de Fourviere

 We got there at noon, took the obligatory “Only in Lyon” sign photos, found a huge market and had lunch. I got an empanada and figs.

The sign says you're not allowed to climb the letters. No one cares about said sign. 

We're all there, I promise

GOATS!

I'll figure out what all these sheep things are eventually. I see them all over Grenoble. 

We saw church ruins, which according to the sign “date back to the earliest Christian times. The church of Lyon, founded toward AD 150, was the oldest in the west apart from that of Rome.” There, you have been educated. 

 We took one of these things up to see the Theatres Gallo-Romains on the Fourvière hill which was in the center of “the most important city of Roman Gaul.” Then walked to Notre Dame de Fourviere which was a beautiful church. If you walk behind it there’s an amazing view of the whole city, so we just stood and stared for a while.

We walked down and went to Terre Adelice, a popular organic ice cream shop which had more flavors than I thought possible, old classics like Roquefort (old stinky cheese), wasabi mustard, and basil.  I opted for Lavender.

Then we just wandered around a little bit, went to a book store. There was some sort of skate park set up in the city center for the weekend so we sat and watched that for a while and then went to dinner which took a while to find. We finally settled on going to a Japanese restaurant. (Empanadas, Yakosoba, samosas, sushi… I’m in France right?) 

Then, exhausted, we made our way back to the Gare. We all had open tickets and hadn’t really planned our return, which was not the best idea. There were two routes back to Grenoble: a direct route that takes about an hour/and hour and a half, and the long route which takes two and a half hours. We made the 9:15 bus, which happened to be the long one, so we didn’t get back to Grenoble until 11:40. I got on the tram, a shirtless mad with a stereo and a beer got on and danced for a few stops, a bachelorette who was saran wrapped to a chair was carried into the tram at one point… I don’t  know. I finally collapsed in my bed around 12:30. I’m still really tired from yesterday.

Overall though, a good trip, although it made me miss traveling with my Mont people a lot, I kept thinking “ah, so-and-so would have LOVED this!” But it was a great way to get to know the other assistants a little better.