Holey Cheese Trip!

Originally published on onlyonewaytofindout.travel — draft/trip notes

Day One - Travel and Arrival in Geneva

• Early evening flight out of JFK
• The check in process was a little disappointing.
  • We ended up splitting a checked bag to carry some extra clothes and our hiking boots.
• TSA was a mess per usual
• We stopped at the Alaska Airlines lounge
  • The food options were a little lack luster this time
• Don’t forget to take notes!
• Our plane was a year old A350. We upgraded out seats, mine cost $18 dollars somehow, and I ended up with an open middle seat.

The plane was very comfortable, quiet and incredibly clean.

• Barely heard the engines spool up!

The flight attendants continued the same trend from our check-on process…

• A bit cold and very professional

We were provided dinner (pesto pasta) and breakfast.

The flight was a weird time, the departure was at 5 PM which meant we were scheduled to arrive in Madrid at 12 AM, not quite late enough to sleep!

• Free WiFi was provided on the flight, however it capped you out to 20mb, soo that was a fun surprise.

Landed in Madrid and had to wait to clear customs for 30 minutes. It was a long process.

Finally made it through and found our way to the main terminal area and awaited our gate announcement. We headed to the priority pass lounge, which took some wandering around… it ended up having two names.

• It was a nice lounge, good food and drink options. Relatively quiet at first.

Finally our gate was announce and we packed up and headed out.

The boarding process was incredibly slow, and our seats were no where near as comfortable. I ended up with a randomly assigned seat at the front of the plane, however eventually joined Ben in the back since he had a few open rows.

We quickly passed out for the hour and half flight.

Finally at 9am local time we got to Geneva. We snagged our bag and headed out to find an Uber to the hotel.

We got lucky and were upgraded to a very nice Mercedes E Class sedan. The dash was one big screen, it was pretty cool.

We checked in at the hotel and crashed for an hour, got up and headed out to explore.

Our hotel provided us a free public transportation pass (I assume most hotels provide it from the city) so we walked out over along the lake shore and then took the ferry back for free!

We got a falafel sandwich as a light snack, walked around for a bit and then grabbed a few beers at a neat local bar.

Eventually we headed out to grab something different and settled on a cocktail bar not far away.

From there we circled back to a Lebanese place we spotted earlier, and grabbed a late dinner and then called it a night!

Day Two - Train Travels

[Notes end here. Draft was never completed.]