Annecy & Switzerland

I have a special surprise for this post: it’s written by my partner, Jacob! He has agreed to share our stories from Annecy and Switzerland, where we were over the last week or so. Without further ado…

En route

After visiting Chamonix, we prepared to head down the highway towards Annecy - a mid-sized French town with a population of about 130,000.

As our campsite didn’t have anywhere for motorhomes to empty their grey water, we attempted to empty our grey water in Chamonix but were thwarted by a huge queue of motorhomes. In the interest of time we headed onwards towards another station between Chamonix and Annecy. As we navigated the windy highway, we smelt a familiar rotten eggs smell coming from the grey water tank - and unlike last time we hadn’t left it a week before emptying, and so we were a bit worried (the smell made driving pretty horrific!).

After a bit of Googling, we found the recommended method was to dump 6 litres of the cheapest possible cola into the tank and proceed to drive around to ensure it sloshed everywhere. Slightly skeptical, we found a nearby French supermarket and purchased the cola (1.5EUR/2l, expensive compared to the ~50p own brand cola available in the UK). We dumped the cola down the sink and drove for a few hours to let the cola get everywhere. While not 100%, this has (at time of writing a week and 1000km later) sorted it out. Really now just worried about what Coke does to MY insides!

Annecy

We spent a few days in the Annecy area, the first day chilling, looking around the town and the second biking around the lake. Annecy is a delightful medieval town with plenty of cute little streets and cafes. We ended up wandering around the town for a bit before moving on to look at the lake. The water quality was incredible and clear and we regretted not bringing our swimming stuff down from the van.

We enjoyed crepes for lunch!

Annecy Old Town

The second day, we cycled the 40km round Lake Annecy and didn’t make the same mistake twice. After stopping for a lovely lunch we went and found a nearby beach where Rebecca went for a nap and I went swimming. After half an hour or so we continued on back to Annecy where we both had another dip to cool off before heading up the steep hill to where we had parked the van.

Cycling around Lake Annecy

Flying

Rebecca had seen a TripAdvisor review of paragliding over Lake Annecy and was keen to do it, however all the places we found online were busy on the day we wanted. While cycling around the lake, we spotted a tandem paragliding company and on impulse decided to stop by to see if they had availability for Monday morning - they had!

After booking, Rebecca was somewhat apprehensive about what it could entail, and how scary it would be (I decided not to mention an ex-manager’s advice to “hug the grass” when crashing. I’m not sure how true this is but he said that landing breaks your bones, you then bounce and hit the ground again, pushing your broken bones into your organs and killing you, hence “hug the grass” to avoid bouncing). Once we arrived we were driven up to the top of a local hill with our two pilots. The hill was busy with paragliders taking off, which provided a good demonstration of the suggested technique - just keep running down the side of the mountain until you are in the air.

Take-off was pretty uneventful, and we soon ended up airborne - although slightly uncomfortable until I shimmied back into the seat. We then flew over the lake and saw it from an amazing angle, where the pilot let me have a short spin at controlling the paraglider.

Paragliding above Lake Annecy

As I landed first, I got to watch Rebecca land with her pilot. Rebecca landed on her bum and just sat there overcome with emotion about how amazing the flight was! I suspect it is something we’ll be doing again at some point in the future.

Verbier

I had found a trail between two chair lifts in the Swiss mountain resort of Verbier. The idea was we’d get a nice run, good views, but without the need to do massive amounts of climbing or suffer from the heat in the valley.

Rebecca suggested I buy a reasonably sized trail running rucksack (these tend to have a tighter fit than hiking rucksacks so they don’t bounce on your back when you run). We stopped at Decathlon and I found a nice 10L bag, although “somehow” Rebecca didn’t manage to find a larger bag she liked so was “stuck” with her 5L road running bag - slightly suspicious if you ask me!

Trail running near Verbier

The plan was to take lifts from the base (820m) to a ridge at 2354m and run about 8k round to another chair at 2200m, stopping at the alpine lake on the way. You’d think from the elevations it would be all downhill, but we figured that there would be around 500m of climbing in between the two lifts.

Alpine lake near Verbier

It turned out that in reality there was slightly more climbing (closer to 700m). My legs hurt for around four days afterwards, I think mostly from running downhill - this would have been fine had I just been at work the days after the run, but it was more annoying on holiday.

Zürich

Growing up in the UK, the only real car train I was aware of was the channel tunnel. I have only been on it once as although it is faster than the ferry, the ferry has better views and is a break from sitting in a car.

I realized that in the Alps that there are quite a few car trains that cut out the mountain passes and so we jumped at a chance to take the Furka car train - especially as it didn’t cost extra if you had a motorhome.

The process seemed the antithesis of the channel tunnel - very informal and low tech. They didn’t load a lane at a time, every lane loaded at the same time and zipper merged, the wagons carrying the cars were open sided and we loaded by driving down the length of the train.

Taking the van on a train!

After a short 20 minute ride through the Furka tunnel we drove off at Realp and continued on our way towards Zurich.

As the campsites near Zurich seemed pretty poor quality, expensive, and busy, we stayed in Glarus, a small town about an hour outside Zurich and took the train into Zurich.

We started by walking from the station, around the old town and lake front. It was nice although felt a lot less charming than Annecy’s old town. Although Zurich and Annecy were both initially Roman settlements, Annecy feels as though it has the more medieval organic growth with lots of small alleyways and road widths designed for a horse and cart.

In contrast, Zurich’s old town has much wider streets (wide enough to support trams) and a much saner street layout.

Zürich

I knew Zurich was expensive, and we did find that the mid-range supermarkets such as Migros were a bit more expensive than in the UK/Canada, however cafes (including Starbucks) were mind-blowingly expensive. An Americano would set you back 6-7CHF (8-9.5 CAD)!

I explained to people before going on this trip that I was excited to do this “culture” thing that I had heard so much about, rather than just riding bikes (almost every continental European trip that I have done in the last 10 years has been related to mountain biking). Having been to a few cities I feel as though I’ve done enough for now, so back to the mountains!