We were sitting around the apartment in Grenoble trying to figure out ways to enhance Jim's career.  We universally decided, that is Caroline, Mick and myself, that Jim needed to take Friday off since Thursday was a holiday in France anyway.  In the true French tradition of balancing professional and personal pursuits, taking time off seemed like the appropriate way to improve Jim's career standing.  We had to subdue Jim's natural California bred inclination to want to see the outstanding tasks to completion as soon as possible.  We bludgeoned him silly with copious amounts of red and white wine and delicious Alsatian countryside inspired visions.  The next morning we let him at the cappuccino machine without restraints.  He managed to get a lot of things done on Wednesday, so he was sprung for the long weekend.  

With Jim free we started plotting a course.  Since everyone in France was heading for the southern coast for the long weekend.  We thought we'd head north to stay out of the traffic.  And Alsace-Lorraine became the goal for a number of reasons.  First because it's north, second because Germany wasn't celebrating the same holiday (they were celebrating a Father's Day holiday, but we didn't know that while sitting in the apartment being brilliant), and third because I had never been to Germany and I was so very close.

So I rented a car.  Not a small feat in France.  Of course, it must be mentioned that everything that involves a French person doing something for you, becomes a large and cumbersome exercise.  It's the culture - You either love it, or hate it, or both at the same time.  It took almost two hours of time to get a car rented.  And that doesn't include travel time to the office.  But that's not as bad as the 20 minutes it took to get checked out of a supermarket with a liter of juice and 250 grams of Camembert.  But I digress, we were going to Germany via Switzerland.

We left the next morning.  The car started (it's a Citroen after all) and we were on our way.  No real traffic problems at all.  We headed out through the Val d' Isere, and onward to Geneva.  This is spectacular country side, if you ever get the chance.  We continued on through Basel and eventually ended up in Freiburg.

Go to the Germany page to see how we got started on this vacation from our vacation, so to speak..