France

Hi everyone,

The 12 hour drive from St Malo to Annecy would have been longer without the assistance of Viamichelin. For most of the second half there was very heavy rain and the prospect of aquaplaning. Thankfully the Toyota’s sunroof, which couldn’t close, was fixed just a few days before we went on holiday! The trip itself was only really notable for the “Tony & Gary” conversations that Jen and I had (e.g. she wondered how many poodles there were in France while I wondered how many Pizzerias there were – what insight does this give into our minds?), and because I caught an elderly man peering over the urinal divider.

So we arrived in our first digs near Annecy pretty tired from our experience.

Now at this point I must admit that Jen was keener on doing this French holiday than I was; perhaps I feel we have seen a lot of France in recent years. I don’t share her love affair with the Republic, what with its weird sanitation practices and ubiquitous roundabouts and toll stations. And then there is the Gallic excuse for customer service. Service stations could be shut for hours during the day and when they reopened wouldn’t take our cards (MasterCard, Visa, Link or Delta!). And maybe no one needs to eat or use a normal toilet in France at lunchtime, since all the tourists must love and want to use McDonald’s and the locals can all speed home on the peage.

Well I am pleased to say that our first bad experience on this holiday can’t be attributed to the French. Our proprietor was “Bev”, who was English and could have walked straight out of a range of British Soaps. There was a 24X7 fixation with playing ITV from the huge TV in the corner of the living room. To really ensure we didn’t enjoy our stay she chain-smoked, suffered from verbal diarrhoea, and gave us half finished, dirty and cold rental accommodation with pathetic curtains. To top it all off it rained for most of the first few days, which gave us a lot of time to think about the downsides of pre-booking multiple days without a prior recommendation.

Such were the deprivations we had to put up with to get accommodation so close to Annecy, which many people had told us was wonderful.

Well we can safely tell those people that while Annecy has some charm it is both more expensive and dirtier than Lake Bled in Slovenia - please email us if you would like a copy of that postcard. Since we had carted our bikes most of the way across France it seemed remiss of us not to pretend to ride around the lake. That was OK, but the best fun we actually had at Annecy was far more lethargic: eating al fresco on a pontoon observed by hungry garrulous geese while we watching the copious numbers of paragliders coming off a mountain.

As I said it rained a lot in the first few days of this holiday and to avoid going stir crazy we voluntarily got in the car to go to Ikea, partly because it is one of the few stores we find fun and partly because Jen wanted some more cheap furniture (the prospect of assembling it excites her as well). The closest one was actually in Switzerland and not really that close. What we didn’t realise before setting out was the €30 Annual charge applied by the Swiss to use their motorways – there are no day passes!

It would be remiss of us to complain about everything around Annecy because one experience stood out above all the others: Mount Blanc. Yes, getting near it as a tourist is actually really expensive but where else can you suffer the effects of a lack of acclimatisation after a cable car trip? And I doubt you can have hot chocolate and pizza in any other warm café and simultaneously watch climbers attempt to climb an icy 4807m peak through the window. It was worth every frozen gasp as you realised you had climbed those flights of stairs around the complex just a little too quickly.

Thankfully Jennifer had discovered prior to our trip that there are some wonderful, rather than awful, quirky places to stay, if you get the right advice (eg “Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay”). Our next set of digs was with the redoubtable, Minitel using octagenarian (?) Madame Lina. She fed us olive oil cake and gargantuan breakfasts that were French culinary art forms. She kept her money in the fridge. And Madame Lina told the most amazing stories. She told us about how, when growing up, she had to look after her little cousin who had been sent by his parents to France to escape the Spanish Civil War. We heard about the unfaithfulness of her husband half a century ago. But most poignant of all was her story of her son’s captivity at the hands of the Vietcong, and his subsequent release. Supposedly the VC had checked her family’s socialist credentials through French contacts before releasing him. Madame Lina even sent us a Christmas card.

At the end of our stay, Madam Lina reserved with her twin brothers our first glider flight. After this spot of nepotistical booking she proceeded to tell us that one of them had nearly died last year and the other was suffering from a heart condition.

We arrived at the airport for our glider flight in a state of excitement and trepidation. We needn’t have worried: Madam had forgotten to mention that her brothers no longer pilot gliders for paying customers. I was first to go and was inserted in the front and told what to touch and not to touch in what situation. This was followed by a worryingly short lesson on how to jump out of the glider should we get into trouble. Alarmingly this wouldn’t have included how to use my parachute if I hadn’t asked. We spent a fair bit of time in the air being pulled to a decent height and spot by the plane before being disconnected…

A partial myth to dispel is that glider’s are silent. This is certainly the case watching them from the ground but it is actually quite noisy in the cockpit with the gushing of the wind. You have to be patient gliding: basically most of your time is spent trying to find and climb thermals coming off ridges. And you also have to be calm, since it was slightly unnerving dropping at times up to 4 metres a second in a structure that very obviously reminded you of your predicament. Flying late in the morning quickly makes you aware of another issue: generally its best to fly mid to late afternoon when the rising thermals are at their strongest. Thus Jen got a slightly better ride, although like all these kinds of things she wanted to leave her stomach contents elsewhere when her pilot spiralled the glider over his house to check if lunch was ready. While the views and experiences gained though gliding were good, we feel that paragliding (as mentioned in our Slovenia Postcard), is actually more enjoyable.

Our next accommodation, Ma Cachette, was run by 3 South Africans: Pierre, Johan and Frederick. The garden was superb, the rooms were glorious, the hosts were excellent and the price was very reasonable. Perhaps best of all was dinner with the hosts and 4 other guests (2 Swiss and 2 South Africans). Everything was done to perfection and none of us could guess that the beautifully light ice cream we had for dessert was actually based on olive oil. Jen was surprised that such a nice place was run by 3 men: we spent some time discussing other stereotypes.

You may be wondering at this point what we actually did on this holiday apart from take notes about our accommodation and have the odd spot of exercise and adventure. In an outrageous plug for Jen’s photos I can report our outdoor excursions to le Mont-Dore, the Vercors, Perouges, Turenne (photo mis-labelled), Puy Mary and the Ardeche Gorge. She took photos of a Church in le Puy-en-Velay that must have had difficulty with its “Growth Strategy”. We also the visited the poignant remains of the original Oradour-sur-Glane, where over 600 men, women and children were murdered by the SS in June 1944.

But by and large the interesting things to do and see didn’t exactly occupy our 2 weeks. Perhaps this is best summed up by our experience of Ille de Re, the island connected to La Rochelle by bridge. Famed as the having the best beach weather in France outside of the Mediterranean, it came recommended by different sources. The only problem was that a Gallic Horde obviously agree with this, and are happy to accept accommodation that is clearly free of material planning restrictions. The keenly marketed “natural areas” didn’t look that natural. Ille de Re is flat, has little of interest, and the traffic was slow even though its was term time. It wasn’t worth the significant detour we made and the extra night in a bed and breakfast.

Thankfully our holiday had a very pleasant ending. We spent the last part with our friends Josh, Julia (the last 2 South Africans) and Laura at a French Farmhouse just outside St Malo. There were no sights to see but there was plenty of bread, cheese, wine, exercise and laughter to be had.

Andrew & Jen

Notes:

· Other photos in Jen’s French collection can be seen here. If you have trouble with Fotango Photos in general, click on “Refresh” or try again later.