Not a lot to report though over the last two weeks as there hasn’t been much going on. All of the kids are sick at the moment so I caught a minor cold from them last weekend and ended up spending most of the weekend resting. We  finished ‘dry January’ on Friday and shared a bottle of champagne on Saturday night to celebrate, and had a board games afternoon with some friends on Sunday. The first half of the week was spent working, planning and resting, but it was assessment week so not very much of note happening at school either. 

I headed off at about 2:30 on Thursday afternoon to make my way to Gatwick airport for our flight to Geneva. We got there at 3:30, quickly went through security and headed for the lounge. We had a few snacks to fill up before our flight and then headed for the plane on time at 5. It was a 5:25 flight but once we were on the plane the captain announced ‘technical difficulties’ and that they were resetting the plane’s computer. After that, they announced that France air traffic control were having industrial action and that was going to further delay us. At this point we were feeling quite stressed as we were originally supposed to be landing at 8pm and then catching an 8:50 train to Aigle, where we had half an hour to transfer to an 11pm train to Leysin. Nonetheless we settled in to watch some Handmaid’s Tale and tried to not think about it. It was a quick flight, but this meant that there wasn’t really time to make up the lost time, and we landed in Geneva at 8:30pm. We were immediately bussed in to the terminal and to passport control, which made us feel a little more optimistic, but then at the line we chose, the woman was individually checking every stamp in non-EU passports. Including mine, when we eventually got to her - despite being third in line, it took us 15 or so minutes to get through passport control, which meant we’d missed our train.  

When we made it down the stairs, through the doors to the terminal train station, we found the next train wasn’t until 9:57, and was only to Aigle as our original train was the last one from there and we wouldn’t make that on time. We didn’t have any choice but to catch an Uber from there. In the meanwhile we grabbed some dinner from a supermarket and waited at the platform. When we hopped on the train, we were hoping that our original tickets would work (because they’d been very expensive!) but when the ticket lady came around she said they’d been ‘super saver’ tickets and therefore were not valid for any train other than the one they were booked for. So we had to pay an extra £78 for new train tickets to Aigle! We were very cranky at this stage, but once we’d bought the tickets just settled in with a book for the rest of the train journey. At Aigle we managed to get an Uber and had a very entertaining ride all the way up the mountain (which to be fair was only 20 ish minutes) from a Romanian driver who’d had a past life as a poker dealer. Very interesting stories! The views of the mountain in the moonlight were gorgeous as well. We arrived near the top at around 11:45 and just had a short walk up to our hotel. Luckily we found it with no problems and entered our doorpass to find our way to the little apartment I’d booked. Once we’d rejoiced in the fact that we’d arrived, we collapsed into bed and fell asleep immediately.