Annecy

Entering the Alps

We pulled in and gassed up (in case you were wondering, yes, gas is freaking expensive over there. Probably $50 to fill up the tank, and the tank could not have been that big on our Blue). Then headed in for some lunch. By this point we were pretty good at ordering food in French (un hot dog, sil vous plait). But it didn't seem to be clicking at this Autogrill. The young girl behind the counter knew some English, however, so she began to take our order, and gratefully we ordered in English. But the manager, an older woman, came over and half-jokingly, but half-seriously, started to chastise her for speaking English, since this was France. I completely agreed, but we had tried the French, at least. But by that time we had gotten our order in. I couldn't really find anything I wanted (no bad sandwiches for me, this time), so I went with the foot-long hot dog. And this is how she prepared it:

She handed me this monstrosity, and I replied with "merci". But no one had mercy on this hog dog. It was quite the...uh...appetizing sight. And you ever have a hot dog served on a baguette? The ratio of bread to hot dog was about 8 to 1. I ended up discarding about 75% of the "bun" because that much bread just isn't right when eating a hot dog. Yet another unsatisfying meal at the autogrill.

We continued our journey, now driving on much smaller roads through tiny French towns perched in the alps. Blue was having a good time, and so were we. But that would all change, as again we reached the outskirts of our destination town, and we might as well have had directions to Moscow. We completely missed our exit into Annecy, and all the directions hinged on that one vital turn. So we ended up entering the town from another direction, and driving around for another 45 minutes trying to find the road to our hotel. Annecy is so small, so we probably saw 75% of it in that 45 minutes, just not the road in question. But find it we finally did, as always, and we checked in.

One of the canals of Annecy

Annecy reminded me a lot of Amsterdam, but without all the prostitution, unfortunately. There is a series of canals / streams that run through the center of town, with lots of little bridges connecting the roads. It is also situated on Lake Annecy, a beautiful lake high up in the mountains. The feel of it reminded me of Lake Geneva, but with a few more mountains. It was on this lake that we embarked on an hour-long boat tour. We sat near the front of the tour boat, and in front of us a woman brought in a group of mentally disabled adults, and they sat in front of us. One of the young men turned around, and when he caught a glimpse of Lin-Wei, his jaw dropped, and he just stared at her. And by stared, I mean, for 5 minutes. Just staring. It was really starting to weird us out a little, so we found some seats on the upper deck. That's where I wanted to go anyway, but Lin-Wei thought it would be too cold. Ha!

The old jail, now a tourist office