Yay for the Alps!

This is a view of one of the Ski lifts in the Les Contamines, a ski resort in the French Alps near the Mont Blanc region. Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in Europe and only about an hour or so by car from the city. Geneva is very close to France...I can walk to the border from my house. Even though Switzerland isn't a member of the EU it is still really easy to travel around which makes for good skiing, snowboarding, hiking etc. The Alps are gorgeous, you just have to watch out for those ski lifts!

Here I am with Riley during her visit to Geneva. We rented a car and drove through the French Alps, an experience I'd rather not repeat even though the scenery was beautiful. The French are really aggressive drivers...imagine all the angry drivers in New Jersey, hopped up on red bull, driving compact cars down windy mountain roads...needless to say we got the finger a lot and I even got cursed at by a Frenchwoman at a tollbooth when I tried to pay my Euro toll in five cent Swiss Franc coins.

This photo is of La Vattay, a cross country ski resort in the French Alps (on the opposite side of Lake Geneva from the Mont Blanc Region). Jules and Helen lent Riley and me their cross country skis and dropped us off at the resort. Cross country skiing is a lot easier to learn than snowboarding and a lot of fun. The only tricky thing is stopping once you have picked up too much speed!

A glamorous shot of my eye after the Teleski lift incident. Those things are a lot harder to use than they look...