Jim & Holly's Tour des Alps

We flew out Friday night, July 16th on AIR FRANCE from Dulles International (Washington DC region) to Geneva, Switzerland by way of Paris. We flew across the altantic on a 777 in economy. Perhaps they should call it "compact class" . Lessons learned from the flight: 1.) Anything less than 5 hours, save up the money and fly business class 2.) If you fly coach, ask for ailse seat across from each other OR bulkhead seats so that there is nobody in front of you. Other than our lessons learned, the 8 hour flight to Paris was fine. We didn't sleep a wink (so much for the theory that we could fly overnight and be ahead of the jet-lag) and we were rather cramped but plane was on time for our connection, the food was good (two meals - dinner and breakfast) and the flight was smooth. We had no problems tranfering in Charles de Gaulle Airport to our connecting flight onto Geneva.

Once in Geneva, a taxi took us to Annecy and the Imperial Hotel where we would spend the next two night! Talk about LUXERY! The Palace was a 4-star hotel on Lac Annecy (translated: Lake Annecy). The bedsheet were like silk, the mini bar was complimentary and the view .... outstanding. We relaxed for a few hours, watch the tour on channel 2 for a bit and then went out to dinner with another Jim who was also doing the Tour des Alpes. We had a great time hearing about Jim bike ride to Annecy through Italy and learned that he was a Cyclismo Classico vetran and that our tour guides were the best and we were in for a challenging week! We were ready!

After a relaxing walk around the lake, we headed back to the hotel, determined to stay up until sunset (although niether of us thought we would make it much later than that....by 9:15 we were in bed ... sleeping like babies!