When in Rhône - Part 1
Travelling from Edinburgh to Modane
This summer, Sarah and I spent 7 days walking in the Vanoise National Park in France (followed by 3 days convalescing near the Lac du Bourget). On a last minute whim, I packed a sketchbook to take with me, thinking I might do a few drawings of the mountains. I surpassed my own expectations and kept a fairly detailed travel diary. I'll share some of the writing and scans of the drawings here. I really enjoy reading other people's blogs/travel diaries about their adventures, but I've never really written one myself. I hope it entertains!
Just one note before I get started - I've played around with a new gimmick here: footnotes. If you are reading this on my website, clicking on a footnote should take you to the bottom of the page, where you can then click the return arrow to be taken back to the text. If you're reading this in an email, clicking on a footnote will open the post in a browser window instead - don't panic! You can either ignore the footnotes, or scroll to the bottom of the email to read them.
Part 1: Edinburgh to Modane
Saturday, 2nd of August
Our alarms go off at 6am. This is particularly unpleasant for me, as it feels as though I have just gone to bed: I got in late last night after my work summer party in Stirling. Fortunately, we packed our bags on Thursday evening, so all we have to do is get to the airport. We put on our backpacks and head to the tram on Leith Walk. At the airport, we eat yoghurt pots at Pret [1] and do the New York Mini crossword - Sarah does most of the work.
The plane is a little delayed, so we have time to closely inspect all of WH Smith's offerings. When we're finally on the plane, I close my eyes for an hour while Sarah does the Guardian crossword.
We've been planning this trips for months, and the thing we've been most worried about is our backpacks not arriving in France with us. Ever since we found out that we'd have to check our backpacks as hold luggage, due to their size as well as walking poles not being allowed in hand luggage, we imagined scenarios of the bags being lost somewhere. What a relief to see our bags appear on the baggage carousel.[2]
Overall, our experience at the airport is very pleasant, everything goes very efficiently, including the fast tram link to Lyon Part-Dieu - that's the main train station; the name means "property of God". Lyon is where all of my French school textbooks were set [3], so I am actually a little bit excited to spend two hours here.
We head to Les Halles de Lyon Paul Bocuse, a food market not far from the station. En route, it becomes clear that we are dehydrated and hungry. I'm trying really hard with my French but I am not at my best just now. We are so grateful to the girl selling us bugnes[4] for speaking English to us.
We head back to the station and board our first train, from Lyon to Chambéry. This train features communal compartments with big windows and luggage racks. Perhaps we're just very tired, but it strikes us as funny that these trains are not common at all in the UK - we had to come from Scotland to France to ride the Hogwarts Express!
I have been wondering if I'm imagining the sound of a cat meowing, but sure enough, a cat is walked past our door down the aisle on a lead.
In Chambéry, we run across the station to get on our next train to Modane. This is a different style of train - it seems 70s to us, with low-backed sofa-stlye benches. The landscape is getting more and more mountaineous outside but we aren't really looking: we are watching the final three episodes of "I Kissed A Boy: Season 2" on Sarah's phone, while eating the delicious fruit tarts we picked up at Les Halles.
By the time we arrive in Modane, I am nearly delirious with tiredness. I cannot believe that this time yesterday I was in a pub garden in Stirling drinking espresso martinis with my colleagues - and now I am looking at the Alps!!! We check into our hotel at around 20:00.
The friendly owner does not ask our names - we puzzle whether our identities are just extremely easy to guess, or whether the hotel is just very quiet!
We drop our bags and now we must once again hunt for food. With the sun setting, it has chilled down considerably and we are glad to have packed our puffer jackets. We discover a pizzeria a short walk from the hotel which had not appeared on any of our online searches of the town - proving that it is always worth taking a stroll to assess the options!
Again, the owners are super friendly and welcoming and even pack our leftovers up in foil for us - tomorrow's lunch is sorted!
And that's it!
Stay tuned for the next part, during which we will begin our 85 kilometer walk!
Thanks for reading (I know this is a little bit different from my usual stuff),
L x
This seemed like the best breakfast option available. Normally Sarah and I are very much of the type of people who'll bring their own food to the airport, but with all the other things we were sorting out in the last couple of days plus having no food in the house, we conceded that spending £26 (!!!) on breakfast was a necessary evil. ↩︎
After anxiously researching how best to protect our bags, we'd placed them in lightweight protective covers for the journey, to keep all straps safely contained. ↩︎
I can still sing, and found myself humming on the tram, the following song we listened to during my French lessons:
Bonjour les entfants,
Bienvenue à Lyon.
Écoutez le rap de Manon.
Comment, comment?
Pardon, pardon?
It is, of course, available on YouTube. ↩︎We had never heard of bugnes, which originate in the Rhône Valley. The one we had was like a flattened, crispy donut flavoured with citrus, but it looks online as though fluffy versions also exist - which I'd love to try. ↩︎
Comments ()