The flights are booked and, unless something dire happens in the next 4 months, we will be boarding at YVR on May 19.  We will fly to Lyon and, six weeks later, fly home from Nice.

Al and I had discussed whether or not we should pre-book all our lodgings, or just the important ones at the beginning and end of the trip.  The old balance of flexibility versus certainty.  Then I started looking and, surprise! there wasn't much available to book, especially if we didn't want to greatly exceed our usual budget.  We didn't think any tourist accommodation in 2025 would *not* be findable online, so if there's not much online, there likely isn't much at all in some of the places we were planning to stop.  Then there's our aversion to sofabeds and to places where there's a flight of stairs between the sleeping area and the bathroom...  I was surprised to see how many apartments include one or the other of these features and, considering this, not surprised to realize the majority of lodgings I've booked for this trip are hotels.  Yes, we did decide to book every night.

Somewhere in the process, we decided to skip going to Thonon-les-Bains in favour of spending a few days in Pont-en-Royans in the Vercors, an area I've been wanting to revisit since we were first there in 2017.  Our proposed tour now looks something like this:

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Patrick O'HaraLooking forward to reading this tour. We've also been thinking about heading back to the Alps and have drawn up a route very similar to yours, coincidentally.
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22 hours ago

Jacquie GaudetTo Patrick O'HaraMost of the routes from La Clusaz on were downloaded from the Grandes Routes des Alpes website and edited a bit—to make them shorter in many cases because we’ll be loaded and we aren’t as young as we once were.
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9 hours ago

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We had another surprise as well.  The original idea was to ship our collapsed, sleeved bike cases (as shown in the photo below beside my bike) from Lyon to our hotel near the Nice Côte d'Azur airport using Mailboxes Etc.  We were even planning to find a hotel near the MBE outlet in Lyon--but then I got a reply to my enquiry and it said they couldn't do it.  They only ship small boxes, they said.  Such a contrast to the service in Florence!  Time to find a Plan B, since the flights are booked.

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I looked at other couriers:  UPS doesn't offer packaging services or supplies, Fedex doesn't even seem to have drop-off locations, other companies won't deal with anything having a longest dimension greater than 100 cm.  And they all want the item to be shipped to be in a box (though none actually sell boxes, it seems).

It seems like La Poste will be the solution.  They sell boxes, but we can't count on finding the size and style we need in the nearest post office.  We can, however, order boxes online and have them delivered to our accommodation before we arrive.  I'd rather do this than spend time running around central Lyon looking for boxes!  We can bring packing tape from home.  I really hope this works!