#22: Driving Home for Christmas

The day we returned home for Christmas started with a ski tour. Tom played Christmas music most of our hike up, singing along to Slade and Wham in between huffs and puffs.

Worth the early get up to see this sunrise 🌅

The only time rowing leggings are acceptable? … as under ski trouser Christmas attire!

Returning back to home just as the lifts opened (after we’ve ruined the nicely groomed piste for the people who were smugly thinking they would be first up), we packed up the car and set off to Geneva.

En route, we stopped to visit some old friends who were spending their week up to Christmas skiing in Megeve. We had driven this road multiple times before but failed to notice the whacking great cable car that belies a ski resort! Lunch at their chalet was a very welcome break and a lovely chance to catch up unexpectedly.

The only picture we seem to have from our entire journey back home… apparently this round about was worth photographing, but I have no recollection of why! Possibly I was confused how we could be in Megeve and still have no snow.

Continuing to Geneva, we had to face up to our cut price car parking. Here’s the thing: the flights from Geneva were significantly less expensive than the flights from Lyon, so while we much prefer the smaller French airport, we thought we better go with the Swiss cut price version. Only how wrong we were. Parking at Lyon is cheap and cheerful, and more importantly, super close to the airport. Now if you want to park with official Geneva airport parking, particularly close to Christmas, you probably want to remortgage your house. As a result, we picked a random company online who had relatively good reviews and decided to entrust our parking fate to them. The gods of four wheels did eventually prevail, and we found the underground car park on other side of Geneva, hilariously back in France again (did we really need the extortionate Swiss vignette then, I hear you ask? Yes, because unfortunately to avoid the Swiss motorway to get here would have taken an extra 1.5hrs on top of the already 3 hour journey!).

This would have been a more comforting sign that the total lack of evidence that the company we’d chosen to park with existed. Thankfully, it did all work out.

Leaving the trusty Yeti in its new home, we got a lift with the company to the airport, only to find ourselves oddly stuck in security before we’d even checked in. It turns out that if you enter through the French side of the airport, you had to essentially leave and go through baggage reclaim to then come out the other side and actually check in. While confusing, it is a system that somehow works, you just need to be pre-warned about it!

We found ourselves with a 3 hour wait at the airport in Geneva after all this. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Geneva airport, but as a word of warning, make sure you take your own snacks… and meal… and water… and absolutely anything else you could want in the time that you wait. We went to the most basic looking coffee shop we could fine (typically, this ended up being a Starbucks), shattered from the last few weeks of work and then our journey to the airport. We happily ordered two small flat whites and queued up to collect them. Upon payment, when said coffees had already been made and it was sadly too late to reject them, we found ourselves facing an extortionate bill of €16! For two small cups of coffee. Don’t even consider buying a bottle of water, which must come directly from a spring in Elysium to justify its price of €7.

What may be the most painfully expensive cup of coffee we’ve ever had, with a unique spelling of Eliza’s name included.

After agreeing to go hungry in the airport, EasyJet kindly supplied us with a bag of snacks containing precisely two pretzels each. Safe to say, when we came out at Gatwick, the MacDonald’s emergency stop felt like the ultimate treat!

Some animals were pleased to see us… some were not!

Once back with Eliza’s family, we had the loveliest quiet Christmas, getting to spend time with Timmie too and enjoying having space beyond our tiny flat. Was it worth the eventful trip? Absolutely.