August. Holiday time. Despite the fact that our children are all in their 20s and don't live with us any more, 2017 was the first year that we hadn't all been on holiday together. This year, 2018, is our 30th wedding anniversary, so you might have thought that we would once again head off without the offspring, perhaps to somewhere romantic - Bali, Fiji, Prague or somewhere else sold to us as the perfect place to celebrate togetherness. But no. The eldest child had a suggestion. "Let's all go for a walk", she said, "to celebrate your anniversary".
We had holidayed in the Alps before, staying in Samoens, a small but growing village in Haute-Savoie. We had done a lot of hiking, sometimes coming across red and white waymarkers which we learned indicated the GR5, a long distance path which runs through Samoens on its way from Hoek van Holland to Nice. We saw the mountain refuges marked on the map, where hikers on multi-day routes could get basic accommodation and food, and we had idly speculated what it would be like to take part in such a foolish activity.
Eldest child's idea was to walk from Lac Leman to Samoens on the GR5, staying in the mountain refuges along the way. Bizarrely, we all agreed that this was a great idea. I offered to arrange transport to the start and a place to stay in Samoens, and Eldest Child took on route planning and refuge booking. We complicated things a bit by deciding to avoid aeroplanes, so the journey to Evian involved Chiltern Railways, a London Bus (the 205, if you're interested), Eurostar, RER, TGV Lyria, Lausanne Metro, and the CGN Navibus. This would get us to Evian around 9 or 10pm, so we'd need a hotel for the night there, and getting to London in time for the Eurostar looked a bit marginal, so I dug into my hotel points to get us somewhere to sleep near St Pancras. Then, a more detailed examination of the route revealed that the first day was impossibly hard for ordinary mortals, so we added a local bus from Evian to our actual start in Bernex. It was starting to feel like an adventure before we'd taken a single step.
[June/July 2022 - I never finished this series. But I've just returned to it, and more episodes will follow soon. Did we make it? Stay tuned....]
