ANNECY 2007

Not a view one would choose for the first of the day. It was so damp, dismal and grey that we drove away without trying the sledging slopes we'd noticed on our way into town.

"Thomas" confidently took us through the very fiddly narrow streets in the centre of Annecy. Navigating them on previous visits had made us almost wobbly with anxiety.

We think of our sat nav as Thomas, but the voice we hear is Jane's. She sounds like a posh scouser, especially when approaching roundabouts.

	At first glance this "hobbit hole" looked likely to be flooded.
			A few minutes later we were on the street behind it. There, to Jo's minor consternation, I took (through the gap between ancient bolted gates on a private backyard) this back view of the hobbit hole.


	River in a hurry.		Medieval(?) TV aerials.


	Lifting cloud showed that what for most of the night and well on into the morning had been rain, had just a little higher up been proper snow.

La Tournette breaking through. It is improving though, isn't it.

Heading east along the lake towards Duingt. (Dwangggggg sounds a likely place for a crash, doesn't it).

Approaching Doussard and the south end of the lake.

In a self-conscious and totally ineffective way I made V-signs at it as we passed our most hated VW garage.

Just another travelling shot.

In Megeve. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking that we're looking at le Desert de Platé. I'd been very much looking forward to a view of these mountains which we'd seen many times, but never in snow.

If you know the area, you might be wondering why we'd taken such a long route from Le Grand Bornand, but we'd wanted to do that wandering in Annecy town, but also the twisty Col des Aravis (amongst others), was closed (as in blocked by snow).

	Tom Tom had done us a tremendous favour here. The route turned out to be very different from that which we'd have taken had we used signposts and map(s) and it provided many and different views. If you're determined to find this unusual descent to Sallanches a little detective work on this <<< photograph might be helpful. We could very easily have got to Sallanches without GPS, but before we'd left home, because sat nav was still so new and exciting, I'd programmed in the route to the Carrefour supermarket. [Our "native" (Huddersfield-based), guide to Chamonix had assured us we'd be able to buy snow chains there].

Wintery (because wintry looks so wrong).

On this day we'd seen several, but who knows exactly how many suppliers of snow chains we'd already driven past before arriving in Sallanches? Ah, well, this view did go some way towards compensating us for the fact that the Carrefour had completely run out of snow chains in our size.

Unknown to Jo, in the back of the van was my stainless steel garden spade (a Christmas present to myself), and my circa 1975 plastic sledge. Hey, they'd be enough to get us out of trouble. Perhaps. Not really. (We got home without using either of them).

< Detail from > . In the evening light we zoomed up to bed on a campsite we had yet to find (but you can bet the address had been programmed into "Thomas" for a week or more).

Day 3: Le Grand Bornand - Annecy - Sallanches - Chamonix, 85 miles