Antsy to get to Annecy (ahn-see)!

 As much as we loved our time in Provence, those darn Mistral winds were making us crazy!  We were definitely anxious to leave that wind behind!  Annecy is our next destination on our Tour de France.  We will be visiting the Savoie region...the part of France that is in the French Alps and is also the part of France that is closest to Switzerland.  If alpine lakes are your thing...this is your place!  The drive was beautiful, and so interesting to watch the landscape change from beautiful Provence to drop-dead spectacular Savoie.  Annecy did not disappoint, it is a "postcard-perfect blend of natural and man-made beauty".  This is a lakefront city with mountain views, romantic canals, medieval arcaded streets, boating, biking, and lots of cheese!!

Here we are after our lunch stop on the way to Annecy...we stopped at a mussels/frittes restaurant and grabbed a few of the "kids meal" hats on the way out (I think they are supposed to be French sailor hats)...it might have been the wine at lunch, but we couldn't stop laughing as we rode off in our new chapeaus!!

Beautiful Annecy dazzled us with her with canals and bridges!

The canals are fed by Lake Annecy; the lake kind of wraps around the city on one side. The canals are very shallow and the water is crystal clear.  The old town is free of automobiles, so ambling is easy, and we did plenty of it!

Beautiful Lake Annecy.  Lots of boating activity on the lake, and lots of bike riding and hiking around the lake.

There are little clusters of homes all along the shoreline of the lake.

John and Babette opted to rent a boat for 1/2 hour...Gary and Kathy opted to eat ice cream!  (Please don't judge!)

Many of the restaurants face onto the canals, which is delightful. And lots of outdoor seating at all the restaurants.

OK...this is a Savoie lunch.  Below, on the right, is a pot of delicious cheese fondue. It was so creamy and gooey, with a healthy dose of wine in it...the flavor was outstanding! One of their specialities here is racelette, which is a wedge of cheese, held in an apparatus that has a heat source.  As one side of the cheese starts to melt, with a knife you scrape the gooey goodness off onto a waiting piece of bread, sausage, potatoes, gherkin, or sliced meat.  However, we sat outside and they don't bring the racelette cookers to the outside tables, so we had something called cremeux which was a delish round of melted cheese with the same accompaniments as the racelette gets.  Still tasty, just not as showy.  (Please don't tell any of our doctors about our artery clogging lunch we all devoured!)

The Ibis Hotel has a colorful, casual, fun atmosphere.  I kept waiting for somebody to pick up this guitar, but it sat there, untouched, for 3 nights...I so hoped somebody would walk by and pick it up to play...but no.

We have been finishing our evenings in the lobby playing cards.  The Ibis Hotel rooms are comfortable (wonderful to be back (briefly) in a California King bed again!!), but the rooms are small, clean and efficient.  The lobby has become our "living room".  The guys have been finishing the night with a bit of Jack Daniels (the bourbon selection at the local grocery store was not extensive!), and Babette and I have been having the super cold filtered water available at a special table in the lobby.  Then we head up to bed to rest up for the next day's adventures!