Day 20: Annecy > Lyon

It was a bit of a rollercoaster today. The day started on a high, and ended with a feeling of disaapointent.

Or maybe I’m being overly dramatic.

We stayed at Ingrid’s place last night. It’s always nice when you get to meet the host. It’s especially nice when they speak English.

The one useful bit of French that I have mastered is “Je suis Australien. Parlez vous Anglais?” And it comes in very handy, except for when the person you are asking shakes their head “no”.

Fortunately Ingrid had a pretty good grasp of English. Even more fortunately, the AirBNB app on my phone does a fine job of translating the French to something I can understand.

So we stayed at Ingrid’s last night. It was a really comfortable, cosy little apartment that was newly renovated and very comfortable. And cosy.

And it had a coffee machine.

Yesterday afternoon we did a drive around Lake Annecy, and that was very pretty. Then we went in search of a supermarket and found an Aldi that was hard to get to, and even harder to get home from.

The streets are narrow. Sometimes they are so narrow that there is a set of traffic lights to allow traffic in one direction to go, and then the other direction has a turn.

And the French drivers are impatient, arrogant, and pushy. They love honking their horn at you and will often just drive straight at you, forcing you to take evasive action.

The trip home from the local Aldi in the rain last night was really not a pleasant experience. But then something magical happens today in Annecy …

Ingrid said that there was no rush to move out because nobody was coming in tonight. So we had a nice chat with 2 of the grandies, we had breakfast, we finished packing our bags, and then we headed out to the markets in the centre of the city – about 15 minutes drive away.

You may recall that Yesterday Geoff had a problem with not having a Crit’Air sticker to drive into certain areas of certain cities here in France due to excessive emissions.

Did I mention that it is mandatory? And that the way we organised to get Claude meant that we could never have got one anyway? And if you get caught without one, you get a fine up to 160 Euro? That’s something close to $300!

But I emailed the people who organised Claude for us last night, and there was an email response waiting for me this morning, which essentially said “don’t worry about it. You won’t get fined, and if you do, we will reimburse you.”

So with no concerns about driving into the city (and the low emission zone), and happy to get there faster than on public transport, we hopped into Claude and drove down to the old part of Annecy.

And what a spectacular little city it is. Clean, beautiful, ancient (in a medieval kind of way) with the markets in progress this morning.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

We parked in the public carpark, bought a parking ticket for about 90 minutes, and went off for a wander around the city.

The central part of the city is very old, with some beautiful buildings and winding narrow streets. There is also a canal running through the centre of the city, and you can just picture this being used in medieval days for drinking, and washing, and disposing of dead bodies in a hygenic way.

The water is so incredibly crystal clear, it is amazing.

The buildings and the streets are a sensory overload. I probably took 100 photos, but they don’t do it justice.

We wandered through the markets which sell everything from cured meats, cheeses, sweets (like nougat and fudge), plus clothes and paintings.

The first few food vendors that we encountered were happy to allow us to try their product, and they were also (fortunately) fluent in English.

We tried different types of salami, and some amazing french cheeses, plus some of the nougat and also some hummus (not a fan, sorry). We bought some tomatos and some salami and some cheese … so all we need is a fresh baguette and we will be in business for lunch.

We bought some souvenirs and then wandered over to the “Pont des Amours” (bridge of love) and took our photo. Legend has it that if you kiss on the Pont des Amours then your love is sealed forever.

Or maybe MBW made that up just to get a kiss? She only has to ask …

We took some more photos of the lake, then went and found Claude and headed back to Ingrid’s place to have a final coffee and load up our bags ready to go.

Let’s digress for a minute and talk about phobias. I’m happy to admit that I’m not crazy about heights, and I have a pretty bad fear of being trapped in a small space, but I’ve discovered a new phobia that I didn’t even know I had.

Units and apartments here in France are often very small, so they need to be creative with where things are installed. In Ingrid’s apartment, the hot water system is installed above the toilet. Directly above your head.

And I’m talking a water tank that probably holds 150 litres of very hot water, sitting on a couple of brackets. Above your head.

So now (thanks Ingrid) I confess to having a fear of having a HWS fall on my head while I am sitting on the toilet.

Today we were travelling from Annecy to Lyon. Not a great distance – about 1h30 minutes if we pay tolls (and travel 180km in a big wide loop), or 2h30 minutes if we take the back roads (and travel about 120km through scenic little towns).

Because we weren’t in a hurry, we opted for the longer (time) but shorter (distance) route. With no tolls.

We told Joséphine where we wanted to go, and pointed Claude in the right direction.

Remember how I said that the traffic last night getting to and from Aldi was bad? Well, just up the road from home in a slightly different direction is a E.Leclerc. And we do love E.Leclerc. But we didn’t know it was there yesterday 🙁

But what a pretty drive it was. Up mountains, and down spectacular roads. Rolling countryside all around us, with these little villages or townships (they call them communes) every 5-10km.

I have this picture in my head of all of the various kings and royalty having a castle and village inside a walled estate. If he wanted to communicate with the next king up the road, he’d throw open the gate and send a horseman to ride the short distance to the next castle in a walled village.

And that’s exactly what it is like. You slow down to drive through a small village with medieval buildings surrounded by a wall, then speed up for the next 5km and travel through rolling green hills until you get to the next walled village and slow down again.

There was one road down the side of a mountain that was so narrow that vechicles could only go in one direction at a time. And trucks needed to stay as far left as possible so that they didn’t wipe out on the overhanging rock.

At around 12.30 we decided that the next village we saw with a boulangerie would be our lunch stop … and a few minutes later we came into Serrières-en-Chautagne, complete with a boulangerie and a little picnic area.

Every boulangerie that I have been into is a work of art, and this one was no different. All of these beautiful pastries laid out, with baguettes stacked against the wall.

I asked the girl in the shop (using Google Translate) if I could take a photo. She said something in French that was quite obviously “so long as I’m not in the photo”. Some things are the same in any language ..

We bought a fresh (still warm) baguette and a couple of croissants to go with our salami, cheese and tomatos, and headed down to the park to eat.

It turns out that Serrières-en-Chautagne also has something that we have not seen in any other township that we have been through – a public toilet. There were no doors on the men’s room so there was sbsolutely no privacy from the outside world … but it was a public toilet, and it was free.

It’s the thought that counts.

From there, we just progressed through a random series of twists and turns, and townships with varying degrees of size and history.

And then we went through this place called Salagnon – in the middle of nowhere – that had both ancient buildings, and (it appeared) a pizza vending machine in the main street.

Mind-blowing.

Lyon is obviously a bit of a central hub for France, because on the outskirts of Lyon (… well at least we think it was Lyon …) there were distribution centres with trucks lined up as far as you could see.

And so we went from travelling through the rolling green hills, to suddenly into the outskirts of Lyon and we found ourselves on major roads with impatient drivers again … which just felt like a disappointment. We’d gone from this romantic beauty to dirty roads, traffic and impatient drivers. And traffic congestion.

And then with only about 12 minutes to go before we were due to arrive at our AirBNB for the next couple of nights, one of us made a poor decision about which exit to take off the main road, and we found ourselves unexpectedly on a toll road heading in the wrong direction.

In my defence, Joséphine’s directions were unclear, and I turned too early.

And when you make a mistake like that, no Frenchman in his right mind is going to let you swerve back into the correct lane again. You are done.

And I dont think that any of them are in their right mind, to be honest.

Like all good toll roads when you make a mistake, you get penalised by having to drive about 10km at 130km/h in the opposite direction to where you want to go, before you can find an exit.

Plus you have to pay a toll.

And then there is the 30 minute time penality added to your ETA before you can find yourself even close to where you originally wanted to be. Plus some additional traffic congestion just for fun.

Bugger.

Traffic in Lyon was appalling. Plus there is that Low Emission Zone thing and the Crit’Air sticker issue hanging over my head. I obviously did some things while I was driving (and stressed) that other people didn’t like, like blocking an intersection when the lights changed unexpectedly … which earned me plenty of horn honking.

C’est la vie.

We finally made it to our accommodation and had some challenges getting into the building to retrieve the key. Once we had the key, we had to take Claude down 2 levels of an impossibly dark and narrow basement ramp system to find our parking space.

It was so narrow I needed to fold in Claude’s mirrors so that I didn’t lose them on the way down.

And then we needed to find our impossibly small parking space, and then we needed to search around the basement to find the elevator.

Dark, damp spaces, hidden doors, and secret codes to make the elevator work. It was like something out of Get Smart. But creepier.

There is so much roadwork going on around here that the place just feels tired and dirty. There was one spot where there was so much of the road that that was under construction that the detour had you driving along a footpath.

Lyon just has a bit of a gritty feel about it.

But I have said that before, about Oslo … and then we did a walking tour and saw an entirely different side of the city. Hopefully that will happen again tomorrow.

We popped up to the local supermarket in the rain to get some supplies for dinner, then home to cook and eat chicken and mushroom stirfry.

We did battle with the coffee machine, but finally got it to produce something that loosely resembled coffee … not the best coffee I’ve even had, but not the worst either.

It’s been a long and sometimes stressful day of driving, and I’m tired. MBW has already showered and is in her PJs, so I think it’s time for me to do likewise.

We have a walking tour at 10.30am tomorrow, so that will give us time to find out our public transport options to get to the starting point … because there is no way I’m driving Claude up that carpark ramp any more times than I absolutely have to!

Ciao

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