A trip in the Gondola to the Bastille

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We got an earlier start today as we want to take the cable car up the mountain. With some practice, we managed to get our international phone card working (it involves dialing several numbers before the actual phone number and waiting for a “call back” before connecting) and got a hold of Tsetse as we plan to spend the weekend with her family,

After leaving the apartment, we bought some lunch stuff (the French have the best makings for a picnic with French bread, Camembert cheese, and so on) before heading down to the riverside where the cable car is.

We walked out onto one of the bridges that crossed the river to get a view of the aerial tramway- Telepherique (sorry no accents on our computer). While I was taking photos on one side, Evy and the boys spotted a beaver in the river on the other side. We all were amazed to see a beaver in the middle of France, but I guess they were not all wiped out for the fur industry after all. I snapped several photos before he headed up stream to continue his attempt to dam the huge river.

The Telepherique ride to the top was quite good. You sit in an egg shaped bubble (they actually decorate them as Easter Eggs at Easter time) and the ascent is quite steep with the city revealing itself as you climb higher. Grenoble is actually a fairly large city, though from our small neighbourhood it seems quite compact. From this height, you can clearly see the older parts of the city in contrast to the newer areas further out.

At the top, we searched around for a while before finding a picnic spot that had both shade and a view. After lunch, we climbed a bit hire to an observation area, where they had a map of the city to show you what you were seeing. We picked up the Prefecture near our apartment in the older part of town. Higher above us, several people were para gliding, climbing in circles in the thermals.

At the souvenir shop, we bought some postcards, a card for Sandy (our dog's) birthday, as well as a few more small souvenirs. On the trip back down, we ended up in a car in which the door didn't shut completely - good for photos but a bit disconcerting at this height.

Back down on terra ferma, we found a department store but prices seemed very high here (or perhaps that is just France) so we didn't buy anything. When we returned to our apartment, we couldn't get the key for the front gate to open. We made a call to the landlord, but then decided to get Benjamin to scale the wall and see if he could figure out what was wrong. It turned out is was open, just stuck. With a good hip check it was open, crisis solved.

We spent the afternoon doing school work before Joshua and I went out shopping for dinner. Our apartment has a DVD player, so we were all set to watch a DVD after dinner when we discovered that they didn't have any of the cables to hook up this DVD player. With our INTERNET still working intermittently though, we managed to email inquiries to a number of apartments in Paris, as we need to figure out this stage of our journey as well as how we are going to get to London.

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