The road back to France was particularly long this time. We got a good price on British Airways tickets from Boston to Geneva, so the journey began with a car ride from Burlington on early Sunday morning and a 5:00 P.M. departure from the gate. British Airways made us fairly comfortable on the ride over the big pond. All-you-can drink O.J. before take off, a dinner of teriyaki salmon, and pretty much all you could drink liquor all the way to London. We passed out, satiated with food and drink, and awoke sometime around 5:00 A.M. in Heathrow. Not much to do in Heathrow until the duty-frees open up at 6:00 AM, but we nonetheless managed to busy ourselves before the subsequent flight to Geneva.

Geneva was gray. Cold and gray. We secured a small white Renault automobile and headed into the grayness in search of the tiny hamlet of Genolier, and our friends Josh and Hilary. Hilary, formerly of Burlington's own Skirack, is now is a pediatric cardiac technology specialist who has hooked on temporarily at a small clinic in Genolier. Her spouse, Josh, was a Boston lawyer and Sugarbush Ski Patroller. Now he's a ski bum, with St. Cergue - a small Swiss ski resort - practically in his backyard.

Problem was, there was no snow in Switzerland that year.

So Josh had plenty of time on his hands, and he used that time to treat us like royal guests. He started out by hauling us up the road and above the gray clouds to the blue sky and brown slopes of St. Cergue, and our first view of the Alps.

Vickie almost keeled over: for that matter, I almost did, too. The view across the Lake Généve Valley to the Alps was nothing short of spectacular. At the center of it all was Mount Blanc, dwarfing all competition, as well it should.

The next twenty-four hours or so was pretty uneventful. Dinner, some glorious sleep time, breakfast, and a car ride.

A car ride that started off as a seemingly bleak quest for snow. The Swiss Jura mountains were bare. Annecy, France, had nothing. Albertville, home of the 1992 Olympics, was brown. We passed through these latter two en route to the equally barren Mondane and the entrance to the Tunnel de Frejus. Modane just put in a new gondola, linking it with Val Thorens and the Trois Vallees. The Tunnel de Fejus a 13 KM wonder that burrows beneath the Valfrejus ski resort. All these resorts, and no snow.

The Tunnel de Fejus also connects France to Italy. But on this day, it also connected autumn to winter. The Italian side was just covered in snow, a truly welcome sight.

The exit from the tunnel is only 100 meters higher than the entrance, so it was certainly a microclimate and not the altitude that made the difference. Such is the nature of the Alps. Just to get from one valley to the next, sometimes you have to visit another country. Just a few thousand meters sideways and a few hundred meters up into that valley, the weather is always different. This was dramatically demonstrated again as we climbed our way through the Italian Milky Way resorts towards the Col de Montgénevre and back into France. As we approached the col, we found ourselves in ever thickening clouds, guided along the switch backs only by the taillights of a tractor trailer in front of us. Two kilometers back down the French side of the col, we were treated to star shine and moonlight. Go figure.

Another 10 km down the pass found us in our destination for the evening, the city of Briançon.

Briançon is an old city, and is known as the highest fortified city in all of Europe. Having never seen a fortified city in Europe, I'm not about to dispute the claim. The old fortified city rests above the more modern town center, and seemed to consist of more than half a dozen walled fortifications. We had time to visit but one - Vaubon - the largest of the group.

We wandered about the narrow streets and old stone buildings for some time before settling in for dinner at the Restaurant Simple. This small, attractive bistro was one of several establishments which - in collaboration with the local historical society - offered a menu historique, fashioned after a typical 17th century Vaubon regional meal. I abandoned my normally meatless diet in favor of pork parts wrapped in salty spinach, lamb chops and fried dough, followed by good old fashioned cheesecake. Washed it all down with a pale but palatable local red wine. My version of a macrobiotic diet.

Tomorrow, at last, we would ski.