16 Hour Commute: Chamonix to Rennes
Here’s the story of my chaotic and crazy commute back to Rennes. Nuff said, let’s start at McDonalds:
While we were supposed to leave Chamonix in the morning, we cut the trip short to leave at midnight on our last full day. We did this because the scheduled transportation home was a bus, and three train connections. Getting to Chamonix already had problems with this bus, they overbooked it and refused to let us on when we arrived. As for the trains, we couldn’t risk having a delay from one then not making another. If that happened we would be stuck in Chamonix, or worse, a smaller ski town with even more limited transportation. So we cancelled our SNCF route and went for the next best option, a FilxBus at 12:30am from Chamonix.
For our last meal in the Alps we were planning to have raclette. But after a long day of losing a bag and having no money for a fancy meal, we had to resort to something a little less luxurious…the classic McDo. There are two reasons McDo was the perfect meal choice for tonight: 1. It’s cheap 2. It’s open until 11pm. Our new route home began at 12:30am and our hotel was too far away to go to and pick up our bags, so we had to bring them into town with us. Perfectly planning our schedule, we could stay at McDonalds until 11pm, then only have an hour and thirty minutes on the street! perfect!
So that’s what we did, a McDonalds 24 hour challenge (actually a 4 hour challenge but we’ll call it a 24 hour challenge for fun). We arrived at McDonalds around 8pm, bags and all, and took our lengthy time to check out the whole menu and order on the tablet screen. I tried a Croque Monsieur Happy Meal as my one course meal. The Croque Monsieur was as flat as a pancake…but I was grateful to have a meal to eat that night. To pass the time I did my Happy Meal puzzle not once, but twice. Around hour two my friend and I switched tables in the McDonalds to get a wide variety of the eating spaces in the restaurant; it was actually to just charge our phones. This is where we ate our dessert, we shared a biscoff McFlurry, and I also had the ice cream pop from my happy meal. Our new table was closer to the entrance. Sleep deprived, hallucinating, a bit delusional maybe, we sat and passed the time until McDonalds closed. Once it got closer to closing hour, every time a new group or person walked into the McDo, we would thank them from our seats, sparing us a little extra longer in the McDonalds. My friend even started to help the McDonalds staff out by picking up trash and cleaning the section we were sitting in. We managed to stay and extra 40 minutes in McDonalds after closing😱(thank you gritty boys🙏🏽).
At 11:40pm, we stepped out of the warm McDo and into the cold Chamonix air for the last time. Less than an hour to spare outside now! We pushed our large suitcases into the street and trekked a 10 minute walk to the FlixBus address. We arrived at the Flixbus stop thirty minutes early, but there was no one there for the FlixBus…Scared if the bus would ever arrive, we didn’t even want to know what the next step would be if the bus didn’t show up. Thankfully the bus came! We put our bags n and were about to hop on, when a lady says this bus is going to Milan. MILAN?! ITALY? NO. We verify with the bus driver who’s not French but Italian, who says this bus is going to Parigi, or Paris in Italian. Still uncertain we asked another person who then verified that it was the bus to Paris. Whew! That was a close one, I don’t even want to know what would happen to us if we ended up in Italy.
The FlixBus was not a terrible experience. It took us to our destination as promised. Was it a bit sketchy? yes. But we made it to Paris, or the outskirt of Paris. The most sketchy part of the FlixBus was arriving at the Paris stop, lots of stares were glanced in my friend and I’s direction. We had a 3 hour stopover in Paris until our bus to Rennes, so we lugged our bags to the nearest cafe we could find. We did another McDonalds challenge at this cafe, but this time we weren’t alone! Every customer in that cafe had the same idea as us to eat and wait for their next bus for hours. I didn’t have a Croque Monsieur this time but a Croque Madame (level up!). After the 3 hours passed we found our bus to Rennes and got on without looking back! Four hours later, WE MADE IT BACK TO RENNES😁. The moment I’d been waiting for for 16 hours + more! What a travel day, a trip, a journey, and expedition, all of it. I’m happy to be home!
