Bag
drop at 6:45 am with breakfast at 7 am and departing at 8 am. We were glad to have our baguette, cheese, and sausage this morning. If only we had better coffee. This
morning, Amina and her roommates overslept through everyone's alarms
as well as a wake-up call from the hotel. She left her bags with
another student's parents and rushed through breakfast and then went
to make sure her bags made it on the bus.
Thank
goodness there were plenty of rest stops along the way. At the 2nd
stop around noon, we bought some groceries for lunch and ate outside.
Amina and Seth had sandwiches and I opted for sausage, comte cheese,
and more pate. I really couldn't get enough of the pate – I could
probably eat that 24/7. At a 3rd
rest stop, we were officially in Switzerland at around 4 pm where we
used the facilities and also an ATM to get some Swiss Francs. The
Franc was treated on par with the Euro but was about 1 USD to 0.93
Francs.
Toblerone is available pretty much anywhere in Europe as well as the US but the GIANT Toblerone (for 149 Francs or around $150!) was a new one on me.
We
passed the enormous Lake Geneva and took the winding path up to
Crans-Montana and finally pulled into town at around 6 pm. As we
were previously told, 2 older Swiss women were there to meet us with
a big sign welcoming us to Crans-Montana.
At orientation, they
explained our itinerary and went over some housekeeping stuff
(laundry, groceries, bank, etc). According to our Crans-Montana
coordinators, the OAM were considered “celebrities” and Oklahoma
was the first of multiple Ambassador groups that would be coming into
Crans-Montana. The town had a specially decorated “American”
mannequin just for the Ambassadors.
We departed for our different
hotels – each bus was at a different one – ours was the Hotel
Splendide. The rooms were smaller but comfortable and the view was indescribable. All the way out of Paris and into Switzerland, we were literally sweating on the bus – it was so hot and Gerd had told us that the AC was not working. Ascending into altitude helped immensely with the heat on the bus. Our room had what looked like twins converted into a queen with goose down comforters. The room cooled off immediately after we opened the porch door.
Dinner
was at 7:30 so after a quick shower, we headed downstairs where they
would be serving dinner and would not start serving until everyone
was seated. Dinner each night was 4 courses. Tonight was a salad,
spaghetti, chicken, and apple pie (it was actually a tart). The
salad was delicious but my chicken breast was the toughest chicken
I've ever had – inedible. Seth let me try his and it was much
better than mine so I shared some of his. The apple tart was
delicious.
We
had been told on the bus about hotel Wifi and laundry service. The
hotel “special for OAM” was $5 CHF for 3 days of Wifi for each
person – not per device (thank goodness) – but we had to bring
our devices to the front desk for them to manually enter the
password. I had to go back to our room to get Seth's phone as well
as my laptop. I also picked up a laundry bag from the front desk
(there wasn't one in our room) and the city of Crans-Montana was
going to do a bagful of laundry for $30 CHF so we combined all 3 of
our clothes in the bag. We had to have the bag back to the front
desk by 9 am in the morning and it would take a couple days to get
our clothes back.
We
relaxed a while after dinner and it was nice to have Wifi access
again. I caught up with uploading pictures to Facebook and Smugmug.
We did have a knock at the door and it was a coordinator with one of
the students who had a sore throat – this was consult #1 of a few
that occurred during the trip. The student appeared to have an
exudative tonsillitis and we loaded the student up with ibuprofen and
the coordinators were going to arrange for the student to get some
antibiotics in the morning for a presumed strep infection. We
watched a little soccer and then spent our first night in Switzerland
with our door propped open with a suitcase – it was so nice and
cool and the down comforters were perfect.
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