Friday October 21, drive from Gap to Chambery, France

Unfortunately the rain had returned when we awakened the next morning, so instead of going out for breakfast we ate at the hotel before heading for Grenoble on a narrow, twisting, 2-lane highway. The car was as sure-footed as a mountain goat, and I was extremely grateful because the French did not consistently mark speed limits or unusually tight turns. Curiously, they marked the slightly tight turns that required a speed reduction down to about 70 kph, but they did NOT mark extreme hairpin 180-degree turns! What kind of logic is that? I kept getting surprised by the hairpins and had to slam on the brakes so that I could swerve around them. That was a bit nerve wracking, but it really became a tense situation if a truck or bus came against me on the hairpin and needed to squeeze by using both his lane and mine. Other places on that road had no shoulder areas whatsoever, and by that I mean a simple drop off a cliff if you veered an inch out of your lane. In the Rocky Mountains once I saw a Mustang that had gone off a cliff like that, and by the bottom of the mountain it had crinkled up into a ball of crushed metal that I could almost put my arms around. Compared to the cliffs, the sections where the shoulder was a drainage canal seemed relatively safe since the worse that could happen is that your wheels would drop directly into the water and you'd get stuck.

But as if to compensate for the driving difficulties, the scenery was absolutely fantastic. The outlying mountains were more rounded and completely covered by trees, and they reminded me of the Appalachians in the eastern U.S. Farther into the Alps the mountains became more sheer and had carved sides and tops clear of any trees or bushes. Those mountains reminded me of the Rocky Mountains in the northern U.S. and Canada. I loved the craggy peaks and crumpled layers of rock jutting up into the sky. Monika took pictures from the car windows as we drove along, but if we saw a particularly good view and had a decent shoulder area (which occurred seldom!), I pulled off so that she had time to compose and take the picture properly.

We also stopped when Monika said she had spotted a statue of Napoleon back from the road a bit. We were out in the middle of nowhere, so I was skeptical but in fact there was a quite large bronze statue of Napoleon riding his horse standing in a field on the side of the road. The house across the street had "Napoleon's Bivouac" on it in big white letters, so we surmised that Napoleon had not only slept here, but he had also brought his army and camped here for at least some period of time.

We worked our way back down into Grenoble, France, shortly after 11 o'clock and seeing a sign for a university hospital we decided to stop in and have my neck checked as it had been kind of popping and grinding a bit, which was a bit discomfiting to say the least. Given that I couldn't speak French and the doctors couldn't speak English, they probably felt I was a real pain in the neck! Despite the linguistic problem, I found the French health care system very efficient. The basic interview was conducted by a young nurse who spoke some English, and a doctor then consulted with her and decided to take a full series of X-rays of my neck. I was conducted back to radiology, given the X-rays, and then appraised of the result by the doctor, all in relatively short order. He decided I might have some arthritis type issues with my neck, but nothing that could not wait until I returned to the U.S. Monika was waiting outside in the 'Salle d'attendant' (waiting room) and noted that the whole episode lasted only ninety minutes. It also was, compared to medical care prices in the U.S., quite cheap; the entire episode cost us only $75, X-rays and all. Let's hear it for Socialized Medicine!

Reassured that my neck wasn't going to break, I retrieved Monika from the waiting room and we were on our way toward Chambery, stopping off at Fort Barraux to take some pictures along the way. The fort was a large, stone-walled fort that apparently defended France's frontiers in the old days. I thought it was a rather pretty fort as such things go, and in the courtyard inside we were astonished to find some rather comical sculptures of a man and a woman. These statues were made of painted tin sheets pop-riveted together and they had absolutely hilarious expressions on their faces. I don't know why the French have a "penchant" to scatter sculpture along their roadways, in towns, and at historic sites like Fort Barraux, but it does serve to make a trip more interesting.

We ended up our day's drive just south of Chambery at an ETAP Hotel, which was a unique experience. Basically, everything was done electronically and there were no human beings around at all. Using the computer menus in a kiosk just inside the front door, we chose "English" for registration and signed in. After paying by a credit card (the only possible choice) we received a code the allowed us to enter through locked doors in the foyer and the locked door of our room. It was efficient and cheap to be sure, but it was decidedly spooky not having anybody at all at the front desk when we came in. We just missed the human touch, I guess, and besides, whom do you say "Thank You" to when you interact with a machine to rent a room? I suppose you can thank the machine, but that seems rather pointless unless they do start manufacturing computers with emotional circuits and that hasn't really happened yet. I mulled over the question of whether I would prefer to deal with a human who was intelligent but did not speak my language or a computer that was dumb and inflexible but had English menus to interact with. We could not, for example, figure out how to request a non-smoking room from the computer when signing up at the ETAP Hotel, something that could have easily been done with a concierge, but fortunately our room did not smell of smoke at all.

This being a 0-star hotel, there was no elevator and we had to lug our cases up several flights of stairs. As we settled into our room we noticed that it had several unique points. Lois would have been happy to see the extra bunk bed built into the wall above our double bed, but we were both surprised that the shower had no door or curtain and could not be closed off at all. The single steel-frame chair was a brutally functional contraption that started feeling like an Iron Maiden after the first few minutes, but at least the bed was comfortable, if a bit low.

After taking a brief trip down the road for groceries we came back for the rest of the evening. It was surprisingly difficult to find a grocery store along the main highway, but we finally located a "Carrefours", a huge store like a European version of a Wal-Mart Super center. There we bought milk, meat, cheap Lindt chocolate, and even cheaper wine. It all made for a satisfying, if not very balanced, evening meal, after which I read a bit while Monika stitched together the panoramic pictures that we had taken earlier on the trip until it was time to turn in for the night.