Over the Jura mountains to Annecy

We went to check out the town of Les Rousses and found that the local cheese maker who makes Comte had a display area of their cheese making. They were processing 2 large vats of milk - probably just come in that morning.

We then saw there was a VW convention at the end of the street.

The houses are all very cute looking like chalets.

We had a coffee at a cafe and then got ready for our day driving to Annecy.

There were large ski hotels in the villages along the way - and the usual rolling hills of green pastures.

On the way we went to check out a lapidary museum. It was only half an hour until lunchtime closing so we had to persuade the receptionist that we wanted a quick look around - and Glenn being a past jeweler didn’t need any explanations. I read about the history of the area where farmers found valuable stones and then cut them in the winter when they couldn’t get outside.

A large stone business still operates in the area.

We then continued to Mijoux where we spotted a large stone shop including a museum. Unfortunately it was already closed for lunch - so we decided we would have lunch ourselves waiting for it to open.

There was only one restaurant open in the whole town - mainly a pizza restaurant but it did do salads which we had - with a cooling beer of course.

There was an interesting old communal washroom building opposite. There were many cycle routes going through town - and we saw many serious cyclists around in the full Tour de France lycra.

After our relaxed lunch we went to check out the rest of the town.

Mijoux has a lot of history from 1178. It was one of the crossing points between the German occupied and the Vichy state in WWII and had a famous resistance and British agent Michel Holland who made many crossings passing on vital German information on locations of V1 bases allowing the British to destroy them.

The frieze in front of the large wash tub was good to show how women gathered to do their washing communally. The ski area also looks pretty large.

There were pictures on the outside walls of houses showing the professions that people had who lived there. There was one of a stone cutter - and also information on the history of stone cutting in the area.

The stone shop had now reopened after lunch and we had a look around its massive display of crystals and jewellery. Glenn particularly enjoyed it.

We then took the country road down the valley - away from Geneva and the potential holiday traffic with French holiday makers returning home after their 2 month holidays.

The road was very dramatic going along the edges of steep hills and through a tunnel at one point.

There were pretty towns and we started to see some corn fields as we got to the bottom end of the valley.

There was a fete coming up - well advertised on the roundabout.

We started to see the alps in the background.

At last we got down the hill at the edges of Annecy - with a lot of traffic. We stopped to refill our LPG gas bottle as we were getting low and Italy doesn’t allow refills there - so we need to prepare. We must have been really low as we got 8.5 litres out of the possible 9. It cost 8 euro - ridiculously low compared with calor gas in the Uk costing sometimes as much as 36 pounds.

We then negotiated the millions of roundabouts to get to our campsite Le Solitaire du Lac that is situated right on the Annecy Lake. It’s packed full - and with quite a few British. One family with a caravan were just leaving at 6pm to drive to Calais to get their ferry at 6am - then to drive straight to Manchester. Rather them than me!

We went for a swim in the lake to cool off after our big combined drive of 2.5 hours - pathetic compared to others really. It’s lovely here!

For dinner we made a paella outside on the smokeless bbq. We are getting better at firing up and keeping the bbq going - and at cooking a paella. This one was really good - the best so far!

There were lots of families going to bed - we did hear some kids protesting though! When it got dark it was deadly quiet and we were the only ones sitting outside. We were ready for bed anyway after our big driving day.

Unfortunately there was thunder and lighting in the middle of the night. We were actually wakened by one of our neighbours bashing in his tent pegs. Poor Glenn then got up and rolled our awning in and put the chairs and table away. We were lucky to only get a bit of rain as we were on the edge of the storm. We had a quiet night after that.