Dear friends ...
For this once we would share our splendid experience with you, our holiday to the heart of the French Alps, to Chamonix. That trip was an offer to us from our very good Prague friends, Jitka (Yeetka) Jakoubek and Jirka (Yeerka=George) Hubacek (my Prague cousin), they invited us to companion them on that down-hill skiing vacation. We had arranged it from October last year and from that time all of us had been looking forward to it ...
Our advanture started on Saturday February 25th at 4:00 a.m. when we, it means Mirek and Hana Stehno, set out by our holdem Peugeot to Prague and at 5:30 a.m. we stood in front of our friend's house. Oh, there was an excited welcome then we transfered all our stuff into Jirka's blue Subaru and at about 6:30 a.m. we hit our long road toward Chamonix, France.
Our itinerary was : Prague, Stuttgart (Germany), Basilej, Bern, Vevey (Switzerland) to Chamonix. Our weather was a quite nice without rain and with occasional sunshine.
About 1040 km (650 miles) were before us but our driver Jirka had an relatively easy job because our road mainly led down interstates with a speed limit of 130 km/hour (80 miles per hour)  and we had the GPS to find the right route. Well. The easy but long and tiring job. And to make matters worse we got a traffic jam close to Bern that took about one hour ... However at about 5 p.m. we approached so close to our destination that we could already see the Genevan Lake and finally high mountains, we passed Vevey and in next moments we began ascending up the narrow, very steep switchbacks. Wow ! There were beautiful views down to the such depth out of my co-driver seat ! Ah, both beautiful and dangerous ... "Jirka, look down at the lake. Wow, such a horrible depth !". But our driver was no lover of those deep views. I knew it so I only teased him. "Don't talk to me, I'm a driver ! Go on foot!". He returned me my teasing. :-)
Fortunately it took us just about 20 minutes driving up those switchbacks and then we went up on a safer road with high snow barriers on both sides. Then we went through the mountain pass between Switzerland and France, began descending to the valley at the bottom of the Mont Blanc massif, passed through some villages and at 6:30 p.m. we reached our destination in the Chamonix town. We found our place to stay, the apartment of Jitka's nephew Christian, and we checked in. Our 12 hours long driving ended. That apartment was really great ! Very cozy and comfortable ... like a heaven in the sky.
We gave a little party to celebrate our arrival, drank to our next experiences with Pilsner Urquell, had a light dinner and went to beds.
Our splendid time could start ...