13th August - France - Annemasse

The travel day started well with a chill breakfast buffet at the hostel.
Ben was a bit tired after a restless night, but Lis was energetic and happy though :-)

The flight was quick and I had just enough time to read one and a half scientific articles and take a small nap before landing in Geneva.




The flight was a bit late and here was some small delay with the luggage retrieval. Some French speaking travelers jokingly talked about going for a coffee while waiting for their luggage.
When the luggage finally arrived we hurried to the first train out of the airport. There are actually free tickets for travelers heading into town.

At Geneva station Ben realized we were in quite a hurry to reach the rental car in time, although we should make it just in time, or so it seemed at the time.

The "express" line was actually a regular, worst kind of snail bus with stops in every corner of the city. We decided to get a cab on arrival to Annemasse in order to make it to the car rental in time. Unfortunately, the taxi never came. So we did the next best thing. Booked a room for the night and went for dinner. ;)

Actually the evening turned out pretty ok. I'm a keen booking-dot-com user and found a fairly cheap hotel right away. It turned out to be a quite clean and cozy hotel with a sizable room and even a bath tub.

The view out the window could have been nicer, though. The whole town is actually quite run down and in places it seems like half of the buildings are crumbling and every fourth one is a ruin. Quite disturbing. But the city center has some nice details and people seemed to enjoy their Monday evening out in the town.

We found a supermarket on google-dot-maps and as always I was happy about the assortment of gluten-free products. Finding lactose free was another matter though. We bought some new yogurt like product, based on coconut instead. It was close to sugar free and had a nice texture to it.

In the evening I called the hotel we had booked in the Briancon area. As we hadn't been able to get the car, we of course couldn't make it to that hotel. The woman in the phone was of course French speaking, but her English was sufficient for simple communication. I had, luckily enough, been listening to a language pod for some while during the beginning of the summer, so I had some regular phrases etched into my mind, such as "I have a reservation for tonight" then a little gebrokken "cant make it" and in some sort of French "I will arrive tomorrow". The woman was really friendly and the whole deal ended up in a cancellation of the first night and check-in the next day instead. Perfect!

So the evening was spent in a relaxed environment at a hotel in Annemasse, watching movies.