Yesterday we returned from a week in France, and three weeks
from today we will be on the beach in Sardinia, Italy. We are definitely taking full advantage of
living in central Europe. France was
broken up into two parts, so we will break the blog into two parts as
well. This blog will be focused on the
first three nights in the French Alps, and I’ll leave it to Noah to write about
our time in Paris.
The trip started with us waiting for the train to the
airport at 7am. With two minutes until
the train arrives, Noah realizes he didn’t have his passport. Oops.
He runs off to catch the bus back to the apartment, and says he will be
back for the next train (20 minutes later) no matter what. I am waiting on the platform with the luggage
and the next train arrives in 1 minute and still no Noah. I look up and see him running towards
me. He was able to catch a bus back
home, but the return bus(es) never showed up!
They are supposed to come every 5 minutes, but with rush hour sometimes
they get delayed. In his determination
to make the next train, he ran the 0.7 mile/1.1 km from our apartment to the
station in less than 7 minutes. Poor
guy…. but he made it!
After starting the trip off on not the best foot, we make it
to Paris on time. Oh, and it turns out
since we are traveling within the continental EU, no one even checked our
passports (our residence cards were enough).
But we stick by his decision to run home – you should always carry your
passport on travels! At least this made
us feel better.
After a 4 hour train ride in first class, we arrive in
Annecy around 9:30pm, exhausted from an entire day of traveling and ready for
sleep. Good thing we are in a small
alpine town, right? Wrong. We entered a world of 15-22 year olds partying
to loud music in the streets, and of course the drum line is right outside our
hotel window. Naturally. I am not sure when it ended, but it was
definitely after midnight. What can we
say, we were hopeful it would end then… but nope. What did we get ourselves into? The next day we found out there was a music
festival, and the town IS in fact a quiet alpine town.
We woke up and headed to the market to pick up
breakfast/lunch. After eating too many
chocolate pains… I mean pain au chocolates… we pick up our cheese, fresh
baguette, and fruit, and head to the lake.
We really realized how much German we know when we tried to communicate
our orders. You don’t get too far in a
place where we never heard another native English speaker, and all we knew in
French is please, thank you, yes, no, 1,2,3,4.
So it involved a lot of gestures and their broken English. When we arrive at the lake, we spot the paddleboats
and immediately knew what we would be doing that afternoon. And these are nice paddleboats – they even
had front and back decks to hang out in!
Noah was happy…
We paddled out a bit to ‘park’ (just stop paddling) the boat
and enjoy our lunch. Immediately after stopping, a little duck friend showed up
at the back of our boat. After watching
him work hard for our attention, I faked throwing a piece of bread. The poor little guy flew after the non-bread,
and when he realized I tricked him he let us know how unhappy he was. He started squawking at us, and I felt like a
giant jerk. When we were done eating, I
threw the leftover bread to him to make it up to him.
When we packed up our lunch to sunbathe on the deck, our
bird friend knew quickly lunch was over and took off for the next paddleboat. Smart little bird. We spent the next hour lounging in the sun,
and later I learned I missed a spot with the sunscreen and burned the area
around my armpit. Lovely.
When we were ready to head back, we cruised across the lake
my favorite way – with Noah paddling and me lounging. Thanks love!
We spent the afternoon walking along the canals in the town
– think San Antonio River Walk but clear waters and 10x more gorgeous (not that
I am slamming the River Walk!).
The next day – Noah’s birthday!!!!! - we spent at a beach on
the lake, watching old ladies with leather skin sunbathe in oil topless. I didn’t take any photos, but go check out a
dark brown leather couch that is at least 40 years old, and that was what it looked like. Instead, I will share a pretty photo of the
lake view.
We cleaned ourselves up and went to celebrate his birthday
with fresh seafood at a nice restaurant on the canal. We followed it up with a banana-chocolate
crepe and an ice cream sundae. Mmmmm…. I
love French food. We headed back to the
lake to take a photo of us dressed up, and I spent a few minutes setting up the
camera on a trashcan to get the perfect shot of us in front of the lake. I hit the shutter, and ran to stand by Noah. As the camera is counting down, 2 bicyclers
start heading down the path and pass us right as the camera went off. We started laughing, assuming we just spent
all that time for a shot of a bicycle, but instead the camera just missed
them.
Our time in Annecy was over.
It was bittersweet – it meant we were leaving this gorgeous place with
gorgeous weather, but on the upside we were heading to Paris in the morning to
meet Noah’s mom. Au Revoir Annecy – we
probably won’t see you again, but we loved our visit!!
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