Goodbye from Geneva

Alas, it's finally time to go home. This morning felt like summer camp, when everybody slowly left with each departure. Some of our group were staying an extra day in Chamonix, some were staying longer in Europe, some were flying out that day. We were flying out the next morning, and like most of our fellow travelers, we were leaving from Geneva. We leaned into the French life and had a leisurely breakfast at the hotel. One last croissant before we go!

We used a car service to drive us from Chamonix to Geneva. Nobody else had signed up as the same time as us, so we had the van to ourselves. Our driver was a nice lad from Manchester, so we spent the ride chatting with him. Our hotel was pretty near the financial services area of town, as well as a train station so we could have an easy time getting to the airport for our early-morning flight.

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This was really the only day on our trip we didn't do any real planning for. After we checked into our hotel, we headed out to walk around town. Our hotel had a bus pass (typical with most European hotels) and a map around town. We decided to first walk down the riverbank. There seemed to be a little carnival area that was set up, with small rides and lots of games. We decided it might be fun to take a boat out on the river and joined a queue of people looking to line up. We looked for a ticket counter, finally found a stand, and realized that they had boats that were part of their public transportation system and were covered through our bus passes! So we hopped on and took it to the other side of town.

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I should mention again, Europe was in the middle of a heat wave. As we were up in the mountains, we couldn't tell at all! But in Geneva we felt it. It was in the mid-90s and very humid. We were hot. We were sweaty. So taking a boat across the Rhône completely hit the spot.

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The map our hotel provided us had a short walking tour, nearly all on that side of the river, so we decided to stop by a few of the locations. The real spot I was interested in was the Frankenstein sculpture. The book was both written and took place in the Geneva area, and a sculpture was put in place where the Monster had its first kill.

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It was unbearably hot by this point, so we decided to head back to the Rhône River after visiting Frank. We spent most of the afternoon riding the boat back and forth as it was free, fun, and cooling. We had already spent two weeks being adventurous, so we didn't feel like we were wasting our day.