Paris / Grenoble

Working in a hotel room gets pretty boring, so I would usually take an afternoon break and go walk around to grab lunch and explore. The real goal was to get somewhere that I wasn't familiar with and then eventually take a metro train back to the hotel. In a city like Paris, it's pretty easy to get turned around and lost so it was kind of fun. One day I ended up near Sacre Coure, and that seemed like a pretty nice neighborhood.

Thursday night, Christine and I took a train to Grenoble to check it out and see if we might want to live there sometime. Traveling by train was a new experience for me. I guess I'd been on a train one other time, but it was an overnight Amtrak, so I ended up sleeping the whole time from Toledo to Rochester.

The first surprising thing about the SNCF train was the lack of anyone there to direct you where to go. The cars and seats were all marked pretty well, so it was really no problem. I did think it was a bit strange that there wasn't someone there to check tickets at least. I mean, what's to stop someone from hopping on the train without a ticket, or poking their head in to grab some luggage? Once on the train, it was so nice to not be constantly interrupt with a cacophony of announcements that you get hit with on a plane: Put up your trays...Turn off your phones...Watch this safety video...don't taunt the flight attendants...

The time flew by as we watched some American television shows that I had brought along for Christine, and 3 hours later, we were in Grenoble. There's a section of the city that is mostly closed off to cars, and it's full or restaurants and various stores. We were within walking distance to it, so the next day went went down there to explore. From there, we took a trip up to the fort that overlooks the city. Great views from up there, even though it was a cloudy day. From the top of that hill, we walked all the way down and around a big portion of the city. It was so nice to get out and walk around for a while and enjoy the area.

The next day we rented a car so we could check out more of the surround areas. We drove around through to a bunch of neighborhoods to get a idea for what they were like. We also drove to the HP site and a nearby mall. Attached to the mall was a large Super-Walmart-esque place and we went through there writing down prices of things we commonly buy (for comparison later).

Grenoble is a great place to be. You can't hardly beat the views of the surrounding Alps. There is surely a bunch of great hiking, biking, skiing to be had. Grenoble also has a pretty unbelievable amount of shoe stores and beauty shops. I don't know what's up with that.