Chamonix Trip Report - Day 1 - The Journey

We knew we were flying into the heart of the storm...but we went anyway. The news had been littered with images of passengers sleeping on the floor with lumpy piles of luggage and headlines like: “European Deep Freeze Causes Travel Chaos!” …and we were traveling on Christmas Eve, so it was the perfect storm for travel trouble. I figured we had about a 30% chance of making our scheduled flights and about a 70% chance of spending Christmas in the airport, so we picked our carry-on items carefully. These included our ski boots...the most coveted item for any skier. We also brought the advent calendar Nammy had given us and from my mother, a piece of marzipan and a very small wrapped package that we were to save for our stave for our stockings. I also packed one gift for my sweetie. I was picturing us huddled on the floor of CDG around a small Christmas tree constructed of found objects singing Christmas carols with a few lost families from around the world.
Even on the morning we left, the Delta website was warning of delays due to winter weather in Atlanta, our first stopping leg. Atlanta, That's way south!. We drank campaign on the flight to CDG in celebration of our journey and our excitement. I was under the impression that we would somehow slip though based on some of Jonah’s travel luck having rubbed off on me. Alas, just when we thought we might somehow slip through, we saw the dreaded words “cancelled” in red on the monitor next to our destination, Geneva Switzerland. We were trapped in an odd no man's land of the airport. We had no valid boarding pass to get to the gates but we didn't want to leave the secured area because we knew that in some cases they were not allowing people backing the airport due to the overcrowding situation. People were disparate in line. Some bailed to take the train, but I had read that there were thousands sleeping at the train station. We discussed taking the train with the Spanish couple but we would not be able to get our luggage if we bailed on the plane. The small area where we waited did not have restrooms. We waited for four hours. And at about noon they did rebook us on flight to Geneva at 8:30 that evening. Our gate was semi superdome...People sleeping on the floor everywhere people waiting in long lines. The snow fell outside.

We got a SIM card for our borrowed phone but couldn't get it to work. We needed to call the hotel and shuttle to let them know we were late so that we would have ride and a room when we got there. We tried using the pay phone. This totally reminded me of when Jonah and I had arrived at CDG 20 years earlier with no place to stay and had trying to figure out the coins and buttons on the phone in vain, before taking a taxi into town to see what we could find. This time Jill figured it out and we were able to make both calls. So we had seats on the 8:30pm flight to Geneva but there was a 3:30 flight with 55 people on the waiting list. The flight boarded and there was a crowd around the gate, I thought probably for the waiting list, but no names or other info came up on the screens. There was lots of heated discussions in all languages other than English at the front of the line or crowd. One potential passenger after another left dejected and it now looked like the flight door must be closed as everyone had left. A had been standing at the back of the crowd which had now dispersed and now found myself right up at the counter and wasn’t sure why I was even there except out of boredom. The attendant looked up at me and I said: "Is their room for my wife and I?" He looked at me and to my great surprise, he said: “absolutely!!" He printed us out two boarding passes, wished us a merry Christmas and we got on the plane. We were the last two. Of course this is probably where we lost our bags.

But I had made a conscious decision to get us there even if it cost us our bags. The true implications would only sink in the next morning when I discovered what it feels like to be in the center of the ski universe without your skis. We took the shuttle into Chamonix and couldn't believe how snowy and cool looking the town was, driving around these little streets in the snowstorm.
When we finally pulled up to the Hotel Faucigny I couldn’t believe we where there. And it looked like it was out of a fairy tail. It was old, covered in snow and ice, and had small Christmas lights. On the locked front door was a small note to Jill and I welcoming us, wishing us merry Christmas and instructions for getting into our room. It was a Christmas Eve we will never forget.

The Journey from Aaron Stanford on Vimeo.