France Day 7...and beyond

And here it is...the last update from our honeymoon. What a great trip. It was sad to leave, but at the same time good to get back home. We'll start out with some pics from our last day in France, and our day of flights.

Here is a pic of John Norris (no relation to Chuck), the photographer that Trek Travel hired to ride along on our trip to take pics for next year's brochure and website. He is an amazing photographer, some of the shots that he got were unbelievable. He is also quite fearless, climbing up on mountain ridges to get pics of us biking by, as well as taking lots of shots while he was riding alongside us...carrying a 20lb camera! You should check out his website, here. He gave all of us a book of some of his photos, and here he is signing our copy:

Our last day in France we took the cable car to the top of the glacier across from our chalet. The views from up there were astounding. Look...snow and ice!
We also explored the ice caves that were up there. They had carved animals out of some of the ice. Pretty cool. Here's spelunker Brian:
They had a stone table up there with all the names of the mountains that you could see. In the distance (to the right of the little village on the left) is Alpe d'Huez.
Here are the newlyweds. We were literally among the clouds at this height. It was a 40min cable car ride just to get to the top. To the right of us, and way far off in the distance, is Galibier.
We had to fly through Belgium again on our return trip. I sampled a chocolate covered Belgian waffle at the airport. Tasty.

As usual, here is the link to the rest of the pics: France Day 7

Our last night was spent in Lyon, France after a train ride from Grenoble. The train was fun. We stayed at the Radisson SAS, which is the tallest hotel in Europe. It really wasn't that tall though...something like 35 stories, and the bottom 29 floors were for a bank (Credit Lyonnais). False advertising! :)

The airports weren't too bad yesterday. A little bit of a hold up in Brussels because we had to check EVERYTHING. I walked onto the plane for the 9hr trip to Chicago with just my wallet, passport, and boarding passes. Then we had to pick up all of our bags in Chicago, then re-check them for the journey to Madison. But we got to keep our carry-on bags for that flight. Not too many bad lines though, so that was good.

And then we arrived back to our home, greeted by little Vontoux (who was quite excited). This trip was awesome. It was a cyclist's dream vacation, and there was so much fun stuff to do off the bikes as well. Trek Travel is amazing, they took care of everything. The hotels were great, the meals as well (lots of cheese and wine). The riding was breathtaking and challenging. Heather and I have already said that we want to do another Trek Travel trip...probably not for another 3-5 years though because of the cost. The hard part will be deciding what the destination will be!

The End. :)