A bus journey

I arrived in Geneva early afternoon on a rainy Wednesday afternoon. The trouble with me travelling anywhere, is it always feels sort of like a dream -- due to a kind of narcolepsy. Luckily it seems this narcolepsy doesn't affect me when I'm driving, only when I'm a passenger -- but it must be having to be still and unable to read (it makes me travel sick, except on planes when you barely notice you're moving). I left London on a bright but cold morning, and touched down to torrential rain in Switzerland.

To be cautious I had arranged my bus ticket out of Geneva for about two hours after I landed there, and although I remembered that the arrivals side of airports is never as interesting as the departures side, I figured I would find something to do all the same. It turned out that my choice of things to do was limited to a bar. And not even a bar with walls and seats and tables or any of that normal stuff, but instead either a bar you could stand at, or large plastic tables you had to stand at. It would do.

Then I remembered I was in Switzerland and my Euros for France would be no good, so I wandered off and found a cashpoint. The cashpoint offered me a range of denominations, 50, 100, 200, that osrt of thing. How much is a Swiss Franc worth? I had no idea. I remembered that way back when the French Franc was worth about a tenth of the Pound Sterling -- so £10 was about 100F. I selected 100CHF and returned to the bar. I was amused to find the change from my glass of beer came to about 99CHF.

I caught my bus without event, it was still pouring with rain, and I fell asleep fairly quickly into the journey. When I woke up it was dark and still raining, and I had no idea what country I was in or how far I had travelled. I stared out at the dark scenery and glumly wondered how little snow there had to be for there to be piste closures. After a surf holiday with no surf last summer, I thought it would be about right that I'd take a snowboard holiday in February, and have no snow.

I remember clearly going through a long tunnel in a mountain or hillside. I remember it so well as I was watching out the front windows of the bus, and as we emerged out the other side of the tunnel I noticed the rain had changed. Instead it now looked like it was snowing. Maybe we had climbed in altitude, maybe the weather had just naturally changed, but after a short while I was able to be sure that it really was snowing.

And it was still snowing heavily when the bus arrived in Bourg St Maurice, France.