European Adventures: Chamonix

We went for our first real road trip from Menton, France, through Italy to Chamonix, France. I'm afraid I LOVE this Audi A8 that we rented, it is so nice to drive. It is so powerful and smooth you don't even notice when you are going 150km/h until another car zips past and you look to see how fast they are going. And I can believe how good it is on gas. We've travelled over 500km with air conditioning and the gauge still says we have another 600 left in the tank.

On our first day driving from the airport to our first apartment, we encountered several toll booths which required small change. So for this road trip we were prepared - we collected as much change as we could our first few days so we would be ready for tolls. When we pulled up to our first tool booth I was ready with my change only to discover the toll was 49.30 euro! And good thing I was able to find the little ticket we collected 5 hours prior because they needed that to calculate how far we went. Then about 30 minutes later we came to the 11km tunnel through Mont Blanc we had to pay 50 euro to go through AND we ended up getting a 45 euro speeding ticket! The police officer asked Christian to get out of the car and go into the police station to pay for the ticket. The kids asked many questions about if speeding tickets could send him to jail or not. Now every tunnel we go through, Blake reminds us to go the speed limit (and there are a LOT of tunnels).

Chamonix is beautiful. It is super touristy and every other store is an outdoor sporting store. Every big brand was there. I was thrilled to go into Charlie Adam's boutique and I bought some art. There was an awesome rain thundershower in the evening - we were lucky to be home and cozy in our hotel room.

We really wanted to go up the gondola Auguille du Midi to the top of the mountain - the highest gondola in Europe. It looks crazy up there, it is a 70 degree gondola slope at the end and there is a glass cube you can stand over a 1000km drop. Unfortunatley it wasn't open due to high winds so Jaida and I rented the hotel cruiser bikes (they were a bit big for Blake) and we just looked around Chamonix.