May 16, 2025
In Annecy, day one
We've really struck it rich with the weather for our four night stay in Annecy. Today is gorgeous, and both of the next two layover days look the same. So it pains me a bit to look out the window at the sky and decide not to join Susan, Suzanne and János on their ride around the lake. The fact that I'd have to fit my bike (and Rachael's, if she came too) into that super-small elevator to get down to the street and then bring them up again at the end of the ride has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, we have other business to attend to so we beg odd - we need a plan for getting home.
Our day begins with Rachael taking a trip to a nearby grocery store (and an aside here: if you've wondered why her pig of a husband never offers to share the duties on this mundane chore, it's because even though I make the offer from time to time it's always declined. For reasons known only to Rocky, grocery shopping is one of her favorite pastimes) and brings back milk, cereal and pastries for breakfast.
While she's out I start the planning process, beginning with itemizing issues, considerations, and requirements. The number one issue is our suitcases which we left behind in Bari, a minimum of a three day train ride away. So I start there, reviewing train schedules to see what's possible.
The ride back to Valence is easy - a regularly scheduled regional that takes bikes without a reservation. Then there's the train to Marseille, which does require a bike reservation and a regional supplement. Assuming that we can get that it looks like that's the first day, with us staying at the same apartment hotel in Marseille again.
The next day looks easy as far as the Italian border: a regional to Nice, and a transfer to a local train to Ventimiglia. It's the part that follows - the intercity to Bari by way of Milan - that worries me the most, because both legs require reservations and have limited bike space. I'm just about to research this when the phone rings. It's Susan, with an inspired suggestion and a generous offer. Instead of us going down to Bari by train with the bikes and flying home from there, it might make more sense to fly down, pick up the suitcases, fly them back here, and we could fly home from a nearby airport. A great idea, and she offers to fly down with Rachael while I just hang out. What a friend!
I should be able to manage the flight though, so I'm thinking I'll just fly down on my own. I research flights, but when I see it involves a transfer in Paris and an overnight stay in Bari, I take Susan's idea and go one better: why not ask our AirBnB host to ship our suitcases up here? So testing out that idea is the next task, and one that takes the better part of the day to get closure on. Until that question is resolved not much other planning can be done; so while we wait Rachael takes a hike into the hills on the west side of the lake and brings back at least a few photos. She was thoughtful enough to only bring back a few so I wouldn't feel guilty over what I was missing out on.
Looking at them though doesn't make me feel like I'm missing out. It makes me hopeful and optimistic, thinking about how wonderful it will be to be able to share experiences like this with her again once I've got my super-duper bionic knees. I hope she'll be able to keep up!
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Figuring out whether Claudia can/will ship our suitcases up is a complicated, multistep project. At first ask, she says she would but has no idea how. I respond that she could just pay some guy to take them down to the nearest DHL outlet, where they'll take them unwrapped. I look up the nearest DHL outlet and see that there's one right on the edge of the old city only a few blocks from her and send down the address.
So she walks over to the DHL storefront to check it out. She confirms the concept but reports back that it will cost €289/suitcase, but they couldn't be shipped until Monday. And they need a shipping address. I respond that it's more than I expected but worth it to us, and the address depends on when they would arrive. I suggest either Chambery or Grenoble, the next two hotels they're booked at.
So she goes back to DHL again (good thing it's so close!) and reports back that they'd arrive next Wednesday or Thursday. So Chambery's out - we leave from there on Tuesday; and our hotel two night stay in Grenoble feels questionable. The other place that makes sense to me is Pont en Royans, where we were booked for four nights. They'd certainly arrive by then. I tell her I'll send the address later once we decide, but now we're down to a money problem. She has no idea how to receive the cash from us.
In the meantime, the phone rings again. It's Susan, who's back from her ride with Suzanne and János and wants to know if this is a convenient time to bring her laundry over. It is, and while the washer is doing its thing she has lunch while we chat about the day and the suitcase problem.
Rachael arrives, discussion occurs over which hotel to have the suitcases shipped to and which airport to fly home from - Lyon and Geneva are both possibilities, which brings in another dimension to this interesting story problem: there was another phone call this morning, from Suzanne, to offer her husband as a taxi driver to drive us to the airport - either airport. Another generous offer! But it introduces another complexity, because the further we bike the further we are from the Geneva airport and the closer we are to Lyon. We don't want to over-impose so we want his drive to be shorter, and I also need to do some flight research.
The final decision gets tabled until dinner, when I 've done the flight research and we can talk it over with our friends. Oh, and there's one more important detail: we don't have bookings at Geneva or Pont en Royans yet, because I cancelled them when I assumed we'd need the time to take the train down to Bari. Fortunately both were still available so I quickly rebook them both as insurance until we know what we're doing here.
So rushing to the bottom line: we have a plan. We're having the suitcases shipped to Pont-en-Royans (so our historic seven-headed CycleBlaze meetup is back in the plan!); we find a solution for paying Claudia, the best AirBnB host ever; and we're flying home from Lyon.
There's one more detail before calling it a night: after we get back to the apartment I look at flights again and see that our flight will leave at 11:30, earlier than I'd thought and told Suzanne and János at dinner. So the last thing I do before lights out is to send Suzanne a note asking if 7 AM on the 29th is too early in the day to leave for the airport. Depending on her response, I plan to book our flight in the morning and then the two AirBnB's in Portland we have selected.
And one last thing. I love the resonance of this suitcase solution. It's Deja vu all over again! We've only once needed to have suitcases reshipped to a different destination because we changed our plans. It happens five years ago in 2000, the Covid year, the one where we managed to get into Croatia, the only Western European country that would allow entry by Americans because of the quarantine. After our tour of Croatia we caught the ferry to Ancona for a tour of Italy with the plan that we'd bike south to Bari and catch the ferry to Greece, ending up eventually in Crete again.
So the first thing we did on arrival in Ancona was to wheel the suitcases up to the nearest DHL storefront and have them shipped to a hotel in Bari - it's why I knew that Claudia should be able to do the same thing. Two weeks later though, overnight Italy almost completely shut down because of Covid. Suddenly all the restaurants shut down to indoor seating and all travel between regions was prohibited. We had to fly home from Bologna instead, so we contacted our hotel in Bari and asked them to ship our suitcases up to us.
Two times, both from Bari! It's probably the same DHL outlet in the old city, and maybe even the same agent. He'll probably recognize the suitcases.
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