Our travels started ar Monday August 10th. After a 3000 yard swim at the Y in the morning, we left our house around 11:45am and drove to ATL. I drove and thankfully, we had no traffic. We made it to our off-site parking (Peachy covered parking) before 2:30pm. We took a shuttle to the international airport and checked in for our flight with Virgin Airlines. After checking in our bags and dropping off our bikes, we went through TSA pre-check and made our way to the Centurion Lounge in terminal E. We enjoyed some good food and worked for a few hours before boarding our flight at 5:20pm.
We enjoyed our Premium seats on Virgin. I always find the Virgin crew to be very friendly. I pre-selected a Hindu Vegetarian dinner meal and it was delicious - a curry with rice and chickpeas, salad, fruit, cheese and bread. I watched the Devil Wears Prada 2 and then slept for a few hours. It was a "quick" international flight of ~7.5 hours to London Heathrow.
We arrived shortly after 7am, went through customs and picked up our suitcases and bike cases. A few months ago I reserved a day-use room at the Aerotel in terminal 3 so once we walked out of the baggage claim area, it was a short walk inside the terminal to reach the front desk of the hotel. We had a good 2.5 hour nap in the room before making our way to terminal 2 (~15 minute walk) to check in for our Swiss flight (which left at 2:50pm). We went to the No.1 lounge after check in/security and the food was not so good there. I was hoping for breakfast-type food but seeing that it was around 11:30am, it was set up for lunch. I got a little more work done before we made our way to our gate around 2:15pm. We boarded our Swiss Airlines flight which was a quick 1:40 flight to Geneva, Switzerland (I slept the entire flight).
We arrived to Geneva around 5:30pm. After going through customs, we picked up our suitcases and bike bags and walked down the street to stay the night at the IBIS Budget Palexpo hotel. It took us a little bit to find the hotel, even though it was pretty much next door to the airport. After we checked into our room and dropped off our stuff in the room, we walked back to the airport and with our boarding pass from our previous flight, we were able to access the French Sector of the airport to pick up our rental car.
Of note, if you fly in or out of Geneva, there is a Switzerland sector and French Sector. It was cheaper to rent a car from Budget from the French sector but I didn't realize that our hotel was in Switzerland. Switzerland requires a vignette for the windshield when driving on the highway and I didn't think about getting one while we were getting the rental car. Because we would need to be on the highway in Switzerland for ~8 miles before entering France, I needed to find a vignette. You can find them at the gas stations but on Wed (the next morning), as Karel was packing up the car, I walked all around the town and was able to find one (the last one) at a post office. We also had to pay for parking at the hotel as the hotel is connected to the Palexpo arena. While we could have picked up the car on Wed before we started our drive to Embrun, I wanted to give us time to pack up the car and not stress about waiting in line for the car at 8am, when Budget opened.
After we parked the car, we walked back to the airport and got a few groceries at the grocery store which was connected to the far side of the airport. I had a delicious tofu and rice bowl and Karel had a chicken and hummus bowl. We worked a bit and went to bed around 10pm local time. I was surprised we were both able to sleep, especially with all the sleeping I did over the past 24 hours.
The reason why we decided to stay the night in Geneva before heading the 4 hours to Embrun was because the Ibis hotel kindly let us keep our bike cases at the hotel (for free). This would allow us to easily shuttle around bikes around as we make our way through France for the 2nd part of our trip (after my race). Since the SUVs are not very large in Europe, it would have been a very tight squeeze for our bikes, suitcases, carry ons and us in our "large" SUV. As Karel was packing up the car and emptying our bike cases, I made my way into the nearest city to look for a sticker for our car to drive on the highway. After an hour of walking around, I finally found one at a post office. Although we got up around 6:30am and planned to leave around 7:30am, we didn't end up leaving until shortly after 9am. Our drive to Embrun took ~4 hours, even though it was only 180 miles. Most of the drive was on the tollway (which was very expensive, especially the Frejus Tunnel) but as we entered Briancon, we drove over a climb, descended down several switchbacks and then went through the town and that took us ~1 hour (to go ~30 miles).
We arrived to Embrun, France around 1:40pm and met the owner of the Airbnb when we arrived. We received the keys to our place and unloaded our SUV. Around 2:45pm we drove a mile into town (our Airbnb is on a top of a hill, which is part of the bike course) and parked by the train station/skate park to pick up my race packet. We then walked to the local SPAR (small in-town grocery store) to get some groceries and then made our way back to our Airbnb.
Around 4:30pm, we got on our bikes and biked the reverse of the end part of my bike course which meant climbing out of our place and then taking a fast, twisty descend into the town of Embrun. We biked to the lake and checked out the expo which had a nice variety of European vendors (and lots of sales and great prices of gear). We biked back into town and Karel biked the end part of my bike course and I biked the mile back to our place. I did a run of ~2 miles afterwards - running down the end of the bike course on the road and then running through the downtown (which was so cute).
We had dinner at our place and our athlete friend Leah (and her friend Cedric) arrived around 7:15pm.
Although the travel was long, everything went very smoothly. I'm looking forward to a good night of sleep tonight and waking up the body tomorrow with a longer bike, afternoon open water swim and run.