Days 5-7 - Last Day in Paris & Onwards to the Alps

I seem to have drawn the short straw here, as in our "taking it in turns to write the blog agreement", I now have to do three days worth as we've been busy the last two nights. 



So, on Friday we walked to Notre Dame.   On the way we passed through the Cimetière de Montparnasse which is famous due to people such as Jean Paul Satre (for those not in the know, like me, he was a French existentialist philosopher) being buried there.  We then went through the Luxembourg Palace gardens and passed the Pantheon.

Notre Dame is huge!  It’s a really impressive building and inside there was an authentic Roman Catholic mass taking place complete with operatic style Latin singing. 

Once we got back to the hotel, we spent the rest of the evening packing  and trying to organise our next stop after Paris as we hadn’t been getting any responses from Workaway hosts or the cheap accommodation sites (where people rent out a spare room for short term lets).

Day 6 – At 8am we finally got a response about a place to stay for the next week, which was lucky seen as we had to check out of the hotel at 11am and had no idea where to go next!  So the next stop on our journey turned out to be St. Chauffrey, Chantermele, in the French Alps about 20 minutes away from the Italian border.  So, once we worked out how to get there (9 hours door to door) we left the hotel, got 2 changes of metros to Gare de Lyon and found our seats upstairs (!!!) on the TGV train to Grenoble.  Nick implemented a scoring system for comparing National Train Networks.  So far, the French are thrashing the British for the following reasons:  

1) The aforementioned upstairs part of the train, 
2) Seats are very comfortable and large enough to fit an actual human being with ample leg room.  
3)  The train actually left on time!  
4) Over 350 miles in 3 hours.  
5) A single ticket for the journey, on the day of travel, only £70 – less than half what you’d pay for a ticket from Leeds to London on the day.   

However, there were a couple of saving graces for British trains – the French have no plug sockets for laptops and no Wifi.  Nick is as surprised as the next person to discover he came out on the side of the French in this little battle. 

Three hours later and we arrived in Grenoble.  The bus to take us up to St. Chauffrey was not for another three hours so we went to “Quick” which is a French version of McDonalds (even though they have plenty of McDonalds over here anyway) and used their Wifi to let our host know we were on our way.  We mooched about for the rest of the time, not easy with all our baggage in 26 degree heat.  

The bus journey up into the mountains was amazing - the roads were so steep and windy with tiny little villages tucked into the mountains.  The best sight on the journey was a random Creperie just completely in the middle of nowhere, with not a house in sight 1200 metres above sea level!  On the way up, we passed a couple of huge dams, lots of waterfalls and saw ice still on some of the higher mountain tops!  

Arrived at 9.30pm, and went to ask for directions to the house in a restaurant/late night cheese shop (fromagerie).  The owner man said it was too far to walk there so he would drive us!  His opening line of conversation once in the car was, “Are you English?” We replied, “Oui” and his excellent response was, “Nobody’s perfect”.   Needless to say we warmed to him immediately.  We finally arrived at the house, met Eugenie our female host, who we had mistakenly thought was a man called Eugene.  Her house is really really cool – all wooden floors and walls, like a log cabin, with lanterns, wall hangings and so many different objects that she has collected for her travels in Africa.
                                                                              
We sat up talking a jumbled mixture of French and English for a while then went to sleep.

Day 7 – We were going to climb up one of the many nearby mountains today but by the time we’d got ourselves sorted it would have been nightfall by the time we got up and back down it again, so we decided we’d get up early tomorrow and tackle it instead.

Went for an explore of Brainçon – the nearest big (well not really) town, a couple of miles away.  We took a French stick and some fruit with us to much on, just like the French do.

The views are amazing, took loads of pictures of the mountains and also the river which is so blue and clear.  Here are couple below so you get the general idea.

Have seen a few (as we have named them) “Hoverbees”,they seem to be some sort of hybrid cross between a bee and a dragonfly.  

We then trekked for another couple of miles to try and find the Supermarche, which when we found it was closed, as the French seem to be even more slack than the English for Sunday opening hours…..08.30 til 12.30!!  On the way back, we stopped at a café which is to become our regular haunt as it A) sells nice coffee for a really good price and B) plays Eric Clapton!  

When we got back we found that someone on the Workaway site that we contacted, wants us to go and work for them for a week from this Saturday.  This is great because it fills up our gap before we go to Tuscany and it’s free accommodation for a week!  

Went for dinner at a pizza place in Chantemerle - really good pizza, Nick finished mine off - standard. The last few photos are some pictures of us enjoying our food.

By the way when we stopped for a coffee earlier, we saw this MASSIVE moth!  We placed a water glass next to it so you could really get a sense of scale...  


Off to bed to get an early night tonight, ready for the mountain trek tomorrow.

 
Apologies if this does not make sense in some parts but it's now 12.15am and writing three days in one go has been a bit of a challenge!

 

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