Saturday 25 April 2009

Annecy

Last weekend my parents came to Switzerland to visit, so of course the first thing we did was leave Switzerland for France.

I'd been eyeing off Annecy for a while - it is a relatively small lakeside town in France not far from Geneva and on the edge of the French Alps. The road there is amazing; brand new, smooth, and practically empty, so we were there in very little time at all.

This was not the original plan. Originally I was going to take my parents through the mountains and past Chamonix-Mont-Blanc, but half-way up the Valais I realised I did not have my passport. This is not a problem for border crossing any more, since Switzerland is part of the passport-free area of Europe, but I feared I would get asked for my passport at the hotel and not be allowed to stay.

We had to back-track to Vevey to pick it up, leaving us with an hour less in the day and eliminating the chance to go via Mont-Blanc. Anyway I was still absolutely exhausted after our week in Tunisia and subsequent scrambling to get re-organised, so it's probably just as well we went the shorter and simpler route to France.

In the end no-one asked for my passport the whole time we were in France.

Annecy has a very attractive old town, with some interesting museums in the Chateau and an old prison to visit, and the weather was better than forecast so we took a ferry ride around the lake (strangely, we were hit with a hail storm half-way through the trip).

Linda wasn't with us for this part of the trip, as she was stuck at work, so we'll certainly come back for another look at Annecy!

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