Take Me to the Limit

Things got sticky as we tried to leave Chamonix.  The clearing that occurred the day before was long gone and the blizzard had returned.  Did I mention the more snow it 2 weeks than they usually get in a year issue??

Anyhoo, I get down to the front desk after doing a "final sweep" of the hotel room and Chris is deep in conversation with the Front Desk Lady.  She says we cant leave unless we have chains or snow tires.  It takes a while for the following things to make themselves clear and really sink in:

1. Flight is in less than 72 hours, need at least 24 back at Rene's to gather our belongings and clean his house
2. The weather has 0% chance of improving within 3 days
3. There are no chains for our car for sale within 50 miles and leaving the garage without chains cant happen because it involves driving down a driveway that has turned into steep glacier
4. It takes 48 hours to order snow tires and you would still need to take car to garage to get them installed
5. Front Desk Lady's recommendation is to leave Rene's car here and take a 6 hour train ride (remember how Lilah feels regarding trains) and figure out after the snow what to do with the car.  This would cost well north of $500; its cheaper to move our flight however when to move it to?  "Storm could last weeks" says front desk lady.  Plus there would be cost of hotel while we move our flight.
6. We are screwed.

We start calling all of Rene's contacts to try and brainstorm a solution.  Chris walks through said blizzard to get to the office of the car insurance company.  I start researching train schedules.  This whole time front desk lady has been amazingly helpful.  This hotel has some bad reviews about their customer service and those people clearly would not know good service if it smacked them in the face. They also were very helpful to 2 other people with serious problems so it wasn't just Lilah's cute influence :-)

Three hours of panic later, a revelation from one of the maids who has come down to chat with Front Desk Lady on her coffee break.  In France, they do not use the expression "SUV".  So, when we described car to Front Desk Lady that term washed right over her.  For some reason that I dont recall, we end up Googling the car so she can see what it looks like.  "A Cat Cat!!" she cries. "What??"  Well it turns out, in France an SUV is called a Cat Cat.  The fact that we drove a Cat Cat changed everything.  She explained that getting down the Glacier (driveway) would be the hardest part and that since we have a Cat Cat she would be willing to let us try (failure of course would be very costly to each of us).

So we went.  Lilah and I waited until Chris was down the Glacier to get in.  We went down the mountain behind a snow plow and the rest is history.  Except for the fact that Chris left his cell phone in the hotel lobby and had a minor accident in the garage due to the stress of the situatiom.  We have clearly hit our travel limits at this point.  First the cost of the trip itself, plus repairing the car on top of Pregos surgery is going to completely eliminate all of our savings (which had not been truly rebuilt since the house down payment). Also, ever since then all these little things have been going wrong.  I've been sleeping even worse than usual.  I cut my finger with a knife pretty badly.  Chris keeps forgetting things. 

For our last French song, a good one.  I can recall if I posted this earlier and I wanted to make sure to capture it.