If I could give you one simple piece of advice, it would be: ‘fly to somewhere else’.
Geneva Airport theoretically has a Swiss side and a French side. In reality, both are in Switzerland, so I don’t really know what the significance of the French side is. I think it’s there to function as the world’s biggest ball-ache.
We fluked our way to the car hire desk. Signs inside the airport dry up at crucial points – this is good preparation for when you get the car. Having got the car, we then had to get to France. The guy told us to follow blue signs to France once we got out of the airport. Upon exiting the airport, there was a blue sign to places we’d never heard of and a green sign to France. We went with the green sign. This was not the right thing to do.
The green sign leads to the Swiss motorway, which does admittedly lead to France, but because it’s in Switzerland, they don’t signpost a single French road on it, even though they’re probably only a mile away.
We went up the road. We didn’t know where we were. We turned round and came back.
At least we tried to come back.
The problem is, the French side of the airport is not signed ‘airport’. The Swiss side is, but you can’t get to the French side from there. It’s impossible.
I think you need to follow ‘Ferney’ or something like that. Even if we’d known that, we’d still have been too tempted when we saw a sign saying ‘airport’. I’m sure of this, because we almost were on the way back and we sort of knew what we were doing by then.