July 16 – Bern to Geneva to Marignier

Today is Tour de France Eve. We made it to our house in Marignier, France, but you will read that it wasn’t easy.

We started the day by saying goodbye to Betty, which was sad because she was such a wonderful host! We had a great time in Switzerland, and will definitely be back! We had the pleasure of meeting many of Betty’s awesome friends as well, so we’re building a nice people-network for future travels.

The move today was a train to Geneva, where we hung out a bit before moving on to Marignier. Geneva is a pretty rad city. Hopefully we’ll get to explore a bit more on our way back. The first thing you will notice in Geneva is this giant geyser:

That thing is shooting 140m up into the air. I guess it was an important pressure release in the old days, but has been rebuilt as an impressive tourist trap. Since we had 2 hours to kill in Geneva, the first thing we did was get a closer look.

It’s just getting all kinds of shit soaking wet. I guess that’s the fun of it! On the walk over, we saw another fountain just taking a shower:

We also walked through a nice park where a raven was taking a shower.

Yay water, I guess. The park also featured this cool building we know nothing about, but was probably important once.

Now, the plan was to take a bus from Geneva to La Roche (in France), and then from there train to Marignier. This sounds easy on paper. However, when we arrived at the bus station, we realized we basically arrived on Alderaan. The bus station wasn’t there, even though we had the coordinates correct. We had instead arrived at one gigantic construction site.

Naturally, I panicked and frantically tried to figure out where I went wrong. I had done some pretty extensive research to ensure we would get to Marginier, because it is definitely the Crux point of the trip. It turns out, we were in the right spot. We finally found this sign that told us so:

SNCF is the French public transit service. We had indeed walked to the correct spot. Certainly made for a franctic 20 minutes though.

Here is our walk from the Geneva station to the fake but real bus station.

Once we got on the bus to La Roche, we were good to go! One exciting attraction we saw was a real deal MacDonald’s. None of that inside a shopping mall BS.

After we got on our train, it was pretty apparent we were headed for a really amazing part of France. This is our first time in France, and being by the Alps is super neat.

When we arrived at our Airbnb for the next two nights, we discovered that our host didn’t speak any English. Which is not ideal as the only French I speak is “je ne parl pas Français” which is a way of telling people that I do not speak French.

However, this dude was sooooooo cool about it. He tried the best he could, and was able to show us around the place and we understood all his instructions (I hope). He had his cute granddaughter with him who knew a tad bit of English to help out with important nouns.

After he explained everything, he asked (I think) why we were here, in the French boonies. I said “le tour de France”. Big mistakey. That created a 30 minutes fiasco where he tracked down Marten, who lives in the same building and also speaks some English, to be an interpreter. Our host didn’t know we already had this shit planned out, so after we convinced him the tour was coming to the nearby town of Cluses, and we were ready to walk partway up the mountain, he offered to drive us. EXTREMELY nice of him, but we didn’t want to put that on him in case it’s going to be totally crazy tomorrow. Also, it’s easier to find your way back if you found your way there.

This seemed satisfactory to him, and we parted ways, walking to the grocery store to load up on supplies.

Marignier is a beautiful town! Here are some shots of the nearby mountains.

Here is our walk to the supermarket, so you can see where we are. We stocked up on supplies for tomorrow, and obviously got this for sandwiches.

Tomorrow should be amazing day. Look for us on the category 1 climb up the col de Romme. It will be past Bonneville.

-Babe