Why I Book Accommodations in Advance

Hello From Chamonix, France

First off, scroll down and take a look at some pictures from Torino. There is a good one of Walter Gretzky and us as well as Jon leading the crowd of Canadians to the bar.

Why I Book Accommodations in Advance

So we hit our first bump in our trip. If Aosta was like Banff than Chamonix is Whistler. Site of the very first Olympics, Chamonix is a beautiful, busy city. The gondola we were going to take up and over mt.Blanc on runs in the summer so we took a bus around and got here about 15:00 yesterday. Chalk it up to bad planning but we stumbled in to a tourist town on reading break. We were lucky enough to find a hostel that had 2 beds left. Being the complete dumbass’s we are we decided against staying there thinking we could find something better. We were so wrong. We spent from about 16:00 – 17:30 looking for a better place. (if anybody needs information about Chamonix…like where to find a burnt down bar or a shop that only caters to one eyed Ukrainian bishops, we can help because we covered every f******* inch of this town…by foot…with 40 pound packs!) The lady at the tourist office basically called me an idiot (as she found the first place for us) We spent the next 2 hours trying to find the hell hole we were able to book. It was about 20 min. walk from town and was located on a walking trail in a park. Not easy to find. Luckily there was some very friendly people along the way.

The hostel was pretty bad. A room of bunk beds basically in an attic that could sleep 12 side by side. Luckily there were only 8 of us. Smelt pretty bad too and there was a curfew of 23:00.

So Jon and I were up very early and booked a different hostel that is stumbling distance from downtown.

Hopefully today is better than the last. Definitely need a beer or 9.

It is pretty pricey here. We had coffee this morning that came to about $10 Canadian for the two of us. (great coffee though, so strong. I have been hitting the espresso pretty hard) We will most likely be off to Geneva tomorrow. We might take a train up to a glacier this afternoon so I will post pics from that later.

Cheers,

Shaun