A quick run across France, 9 Hours on a fast train.

Annecy, France, gateway to the French Alps

I took a simple jaunt across France from west to east to say goodbye to one of my friends. This trip was much different than the one from Prague to Switzerland. I only had three very efficient train changes (Barcelona to Narbonne, Nimes, Lyon to Annecy) and three out of the four trains I took were high-speed. It was a total of about nine hours on the trains. But the time seemed to go by very quickly. As I mentioned before, the entire high-speed train network in Europe is a very comfortable and efficient way to get around.
Spending nine hours on train may seem like a lot of time.  But when you consider the 7 hour door-to-door time of flying, the nine hours, from city center to city center, on the train doesn't seem that out of line. And when you take away the aggravation of security in most airports, it's a lot better on your spirits.

Annecy, France (pronounced antsy) is very proud of the fact that they have the cleanest lake in all of Europe. When I say clean I mean drinking water clean. If you stand on the shore and look down to a depth of 20 or 45 feet, you can see the detail of the vegetation on the bottom. The lake is what I think they consider a medium-sized late in the alps. You can ride a bicycle all the way around it, a total of about 46 km. in fact they have what we would consider a duathalon of running and swimming around the lake every year. That's strictly a summertime occurrence as the water was quite cold at the moment. The lake does not get cold enough to freeze tho.

I am going to finish this post altho Apple has decided to delete half of my pictures from that day. I will never purchase another Apple product because of their idiotic insistence that only they, the Apple designers, know what is best for the users and take total control of the functioning of their products. Because of this, my IPad elected to delete all the pictures from the day in Annecy. These pictures cannot be replaced and as I consider myself a pretty astute user, I'm particularly upset that Apple made sure I was using the product only in the way they wish to use it.


It just so happened that the day that it was Annecy's annual fall festival and the town was teeming with visitors looking for holiday gifts and bargains. It's just seemed that everywhere I went in europe there were holidays and festivals going on. This was just the latest. This festival has been held on the first Tuesday of December for many years. They get 100,000 visitor for this 1 day event. The entire town (every street and piazza) was full of booths selling food items, beautiful sausages, cheeses, and bread. There also the usual flea market items like hand knitted caps and scarfs, and lots of home made jewelry. Because it was Christmas, there were lots of Christmas oriented items like mangers and Christmas tree ornaments and pretty much anything else you would want to light up your house.

Annecy is a very old town with Roman origins. Its style is like a combination of French Mediterranean and Swiss Village. It had snowed two days before I got there and there were vestiges of the snow pushed into corners here and there. And it was cold. I'm just glad I had my ski parka that I purchased in Geneva.
It is very close to the Alps. So close in fact that a lot of people stay in town and take the train daily 15 minute for a ride up into the mountains to ski at local resorts.
For those of you bicyclist fans, like me, and who watch the Tour de France more than once, you'll recognize the town as the entrée to Mont Ventoux, one of those make or break stages in that ill famed race. It is hard to visualize, with a temperature of -5°C, bicyclists screaming around the piazzas in the town during July in the summer heat. But they do and there's a lot of cyclist in the town itself. Even at that low temperature it is an efficient way to get around.

It was a very relaxing couple of days. I didn't do much but visit with my friends, and walk the town and take pictures (Which Apple promptly deleted. I will never forgive the software designers for that). Oh and eat. This is next to Switzerland so there's lots of chocolate and pastry around.
It's just one of those stops on the train that you usually look out at the platform and say this looks like a nice village and I should stop here and look around, but usually don't, with every intention of coming back and exploring. Because of my friends being there I had that opportunity. And I'm glad I did. It is a university town, which is why my friends are there, and that always lends a certain element of excitement and freshness to a village. It has the Annecy Lake, with its crystal clear water, its active boating community, and its ferries traversing the lake from town to town. The buildings and streets are right out of every french or swiss movie you ever saw. And the people couldn't be warmer, even allowing me to try to talk in my high school French. I like this area so much, its on my must return list when I make more time to get out of the city into the foothills area (bicycle tour anyone?). And I have started a program to relearn enough french to get around and have actual conversations.

An aside. One of the amazing aspects of my journey was the number of bilingual people I came across, who could naturally swap from language to language with ease. There is a need for, and a natural affinity to learn spanish because of the large hispanic community in California. But I'm starting with French. I did have 3 years of it many moons ago. If others can do be so fluent in multiple languages, so should I be able to.
I also was helping one of my newfound friends tackle a difficult personal problem which required a lot of introspection. He wanted to send me the results of his personal goals but realized he would probably do this work in his native language, German, end would need to translate for me. He said sometimes he does dream in English, but most of his hard work he prefers to think in German. And he speaks 2 other languages to boot. It is a real education for me to understand how the mind works, just on the simple issue of languages.

Back to Annecy. I spent a couple of day there going to the market, taking pictures and reliving what living in a cold environment would mean. I realize my blood has grown thin over the years and it would take a real effort on my part to give up the warm climate of Southern California. I'll drive to the snow, for the day, or for a week, thank you. And go back to the warm climate of Santa Barbara when done with the winter sports fun.
The rest of the few pictures that survived Apples purge of my pictures is in this library