As we’ve mentioned before, both Allister and Charlotte attended camps Pennsylvania in the summer of 2008 sponsored by the Children’s International Summer Village (CISV) organization. One of the delegations at Allister’s camp was from Chambery a city in France near Grenoble and and the French Alps. We arranged to meet the delegation and their families and stopped there on our way to Italy.
I have pictures from the dinner we shared with the delegates, their leader and families in a separate post. The images in this post are some of those we saw in our sightseeing in the Chambery area.
We went for a hike in a gorge that the Romans had used as road from a valley through the Chartreuse (yes, there really is a such a place) Mountains about 20 kms from Chambery. This photo looks down the gorge to the valley beyond.
You can see the remains of Roman road development under Allister’s feet.
Once you passed through the gorge, this was the view that greeted you. We left our car at the top and walked down and back.
We ate local dishes at the Chambery restaurants we visited. This was raclette in which a chunk of cheese was heated to the melting point by an element that is part of this contraption and then scraped off and eaten with bread or sausage meet that was part of the dish. The next night we ate fondue which was delicious.
Our next stop after Chambery was Venice, with an overnight stop in Parma, Italy. This was a view from the highway after we left Chambery.
The rains that we’d seen in Avignon must have fallen as snow in these hills in the Alps. Not far from where this photo was taken we went through an 11.3 km tunnel under Mount Blanc. There was about a 30 Euro toll for this tunnel but no other way around. We had never seen such emergency equipment in a tunnel – apparently to guard against fire – and places of refuge if a car stopped in the middle of the tunnel.
