Xmas / NY Changeover...

27+28th Dec: So this year I've decided to keep the non active stuff on the blog to a minimum, but this weekend definitely deserves a mention. Everyone in the alps to do with transport/logistics got royally %**&*ed this weekend. It's been all over the news in both France and the UK.

A monster storm hit the alps in the wee hours of Saturday morning. Great! We desperately needed snow. However the road conditions were less fun, or to be more precise, the awful drivers were.

I left at 4:45am. The first journey was fine, snow on the roads but no traffic. By the return leg everywhere was chaos. People were by the side / in the middle / in the ditch of the road completely stuck. Most of them without chains. People were overtaking stopped people and getting stuck on the other side of the road into oncoming traffic. Chaos everywhere. In addition virtually every departure / arrival at GVA was delayed / cancelled.

Gridlock as far as you can see

My lunch

By the time I got home 21 hours later at 1:45am I'd seen countless crashed cars, shouted at numerous people doing some of the most spectacularly awful driving I've ever seen and overtaken more people than ever in a day.  The 2 hours I wasn't physically driving were spent juggling fuming clients in the airport and drivers stuck around the region. Fun times. I was physically and mentally exhausted. Luckily I had a pleasant 3 hours of fitful sleep before another 12 hour shift. When I walked into the airport on Sunday morning I had countless people begging me for lifts to every resort you could name.

Stuck people sleeping all over the airport

The tour operators potentially had the worst of it. Friends of mine were stuck in Chambery getting shouted at for 48 hours with no sleep. Those at GVA were hardly better off. It took three days to clear the backlog of clients who had missed flights / transfers.