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!