We followed the road the Chambery and then eventually started to follow in the tracks of the Tour de France, you could tell as scrawled on to the road surface were many abbreviations and team names etc and we followed the roads and then joined one of the Cols over the mountain with a huge drop one side and no safety barriers and so you have to watch carefully and go round corners slowly just in case somebody else comes the other way and eventually we arrived in Valloius where we stayed and had a picnic lunch. As previously mentioned we had planned to look at Hotels en-route as we did not want to book accommodation either to early or to late and as we were only one hour from our first choice location at lunchtime we changed and thought we would go to Val Thorens instead as there was plenty of accommodation there as is primarily a ski resort and currently without snow. The weather up to this point had been quite nice and we were then contemplating continuing with another Col which has the honour of being the highest paved road in Europe. Several miles later after a succession of long tunnels we we emerged in to the pouring rain and very low cloud base, this is not so good.
We stopped and using the internet was able to discover that a weather front had moved in and Val Thorens was not sleet and snow and was going to be on 2 degrees C and also the low cloud base put us going over the highest road form a safety perspective, if you cannot see neither can they and no views either and although very disappointed we cannot afford to take unnecessary risks and so we then started looking again for a different location to stay. The on a signboard appeared the than town name of Annecy, which we had visited once before with a group of friends,and so lets have a look at Hotels there and so we found a Mercure slightly out of town and booked for one night.
The weather had not improved after we had arrived in Annecy and it was still raining as we parked the car and checked in and the room was fine. So a slight rest and then had dinner in the Hotel restaurant which was not busy but we have to say the food was very good and they took good care of Noels issues.After dinner we went back to the room and Noel watched the Lille-Chelsea match ( which the blues won 1-2-) on his Nexus pad and Jennifer continued reading one of her many books.
A very nice day with quite some weather changes but we have to remember it is October and we are in the mountains where weather can change very quickly.
