Vacation #2 (Grenoble, Chambèry, Alpe d'Huez, Briançon)

The view outside our Gite looking into the valley (Alpe d'Huez)random viewpoint on our drive through the mountain pass
waterfall on the way to Briançon from Alpe d'Huezlooking East during a small sunset hike

We arrived back in Saint Etienne and hung around for Thursday and Friday. My friend Ryan and I talked about taking a short trip up to the alps before all of the snow comes. We decided to rent a car for 3 days and drive up to the mountains. Saturday morning we hopped in our Renault 4 door manual transmission rental car. Rachel came along for the ride as well and we decided to go to Grenoble for the night to stay with a girl named Marie through www.couchsurfing.com. I was the only person with an international driver’s license so I drove the entire time, which really wasn’t much in comparison with the 8 hour drive to Delaware (or the trip out west!)… We arrived in the afternoon and took advantage of having a car…drove around the city to get our bearings and then followed a road up into the mountains/hills surrounding Grenoble. Grenoble is the capital city of the French alps and is surrounded by beautiful mountains and the Isere river cuts through the city as well. On our little drive up through the hills we ran into some interesting sights (4 hunting dogs ran right in front of our car all anxiously sniffing out prey as well as a woman painting the beautiful landscapes on an old dirt road.) We pulled up next to the woman and we talked a little bit about her painting and she said that this road was supposed to be used for painting landscapes not big cars. After our excursion, we headed back to park our car near Marie’s place. We decided to walk around the city a little bit and grab some dinner. We met up with Marie and her flatmate Kroc (Guillaume) around 7h30 and went to a wine bar that had all of these different fruit wines. To give some examples: Passion, strawberry and litchi, pear and walnut, cherry, nectarine, raspberry. After the bar we went to one of her friend’s apartment and hung out with about 5 of her friends. This was a very interesting experience as we had never met any of these people before and all of a sudden we were in an apartment hanging out with them. We had a very great first experience with couch surfing. We ended up walking back to Marie’s apartment which was about 30 minutes, and Marie was telling me about how she couch surfed for 10 months throughout the world (all over Europe, Peru, Bolivia, India, Africa, California, New York, Montreal.) It sounded like a crazy trip, I can’t even imagine it. We were talking about different cultures and the way of life in America vs. Europe vs. the rest of the world. So amazing.

Sunday we headed north to Chambery to meet up with 2 other assistants from Lyon (not Saint Etienne), Maggie and Tim. We picked them up at the train station and drove up to the mountains to do a day hike. We found this day hike in a book I bought called “Around Chambery”. It was filled with about 30 hikes around Chambery with everything from caves, rock climbing, and waterfalls, to village ruins, castles and fortresses. We picked a hike with pretty much everything, but only made it about halfway up so we missed out on the ancient villages and fortress. It was getting really foggy and we wouldn’t have been able to see anything at the summit anyway. We saw a lot of people rock climbing. The foliage was absolutely wonderful and it reminded me of my trip to Lago Como (up in the mountains in Italy) when I studied in Paris. After our hike, we headed to Alpe d’Huez where we booked 5 beds in a gite. A gite is like a large house that can house around 18 people with a fully equipped kitchen and dining room. In this case, it is much better than a hostel because sometimes hostels only have beds and is more similar to a hotel. We stayed in this gite and it was completely empty except for us 5. It was 18 euros a night and housed 18 people, with 2 kitchens, a huge dining room with a fire place, and a huge bathroom with 2 showers, 3 sinks, and 3 toilets. There were about 4 bedrooms upstairs with anywhere from 2 beds to 8. When we woke up the next day we were all amazed at the view as we had arrived late in the evening and couldn’t see anything in the dark.

Monday we headed to check out the Alpe d’Huez ski resort and then continued on our drive eastward through the alps towards Briancon. Briancon is the highest city in Europe and is about 20 km (12 miles) from Italy. There is an old Roman fortress that sits on top of the mountain overlooking the city. In the old part of the city near the fortress, there is also a huge gorge with a small river flowing through. After checking out the city of Briancon for the afternoon, we headed back through the mountain passes back to Saint Etienne. On the way home we took a short detour up a side road to try and catch the sunset from a mountain top and I practically ran up this mountain side. After reaching the top several times (multiple summits), I decided to give up as I was so far away from our car. I looked up higher on the mountainside and saw a mountain goat off in the distance. It was so crazy and reminded me of the Mountains episode on Planet Earth. After seeing the alps I can’t wait to go up and ski once it starts snowing!! ...I heard it is supposed to snow on Thursday in Saint Etienne... :-)