The end of the road

We woke up at an ungodly hour the next morning (4:00 AM to be exact), to catch our flight back to Geneva. We had quite the varied forms of transportation on this trip, plane, train, taxi, rented car, tram, bus, and metro. We compared prices and it was actually half as expensive to fly on a budget airline, Easyjet, rather than take the train back. We got out without too much incident and got about half an hour from Geneva when the captain announces they have some weather issues in Geneva and we are going to circle for a while till we run out of fuel and hope the snow clears up. Half an hour later he says, nope, still snowed in, we’re going to go land in Grenoble and refuel and see what happens. After we land in Grenoble, it became like a scene from the movie Airplane. You know the scene at the end when the plan is landing and there are no brakes so they keep announcing gates numbers as the plane skids to a halt? (“Gate 24, Gate 35, Gate 56…etc.”) That’s what it was like, except he kept announcing when we would be able to take off again and head to Geneva. Long story short, we ended up sitting in Grenoble for a good five hours (see picture) and finally made it to Geneva at around 4:30 instead of 10:30 AM. After finally arriving in and enjoying a nice meal, we had planned on taking public transport to a certain point and then catching a taxi up the mountain to the school. Little did we realize, it was New Year’s Eve and thus, there were little to no taxis to be found. After much frustration and around an hour and a half of waiting in the rain, we finally flagged one down and made it up to the school and got the family off back to the US the next morning without too much more incident. Thus the long history of my Christmas Vacation.