We had a number of options for the tour around the lake, but we chose this one-hour one.
This bigger boat did two hour cruises complete with a meal.
But we went on this shorter Compagnie des Bateaux excursion boat. Although the linked website is in English, the announcer used only French. Needless to say, I understood almost nothing. the Savoie was our boat.
There was a nice walk down the quay to it.
The park side was also lovely.
The swans seem to like this canal. The water is very clear. The dark places you see are the underwater foliage.
I tried to capture some of the fish swimming in it. Trout did see fishermen on the canal farther into town.
No matter how many pictures I took, the fish hid.
I left all these in because I thought they were pretty and that they would make really hard jigsaw puzzles.
In this one you can see the foliage a little better.
So off we went into the lake.
That's the park behind us.
We could have taken a speed boat like this, but Trout was concerned about sunburn.
I loved these rocky mountains.
The lake is quite large. The link says it's the 2nd largest in France, and also the cleanest in Europe. I just thought it was beautiful.
I think everyone else on the boat with us was French.
This is a beach across the lake from Annecy.
This is typical of the way we saw things being built all over. Most locations are so hilly and crowded that it is nearly impossible to get materials up to a building site. So they set up a BIG crane and lift them up.
This escarpment was amazingly beautiful.
The chateau wasn't too bad either.
But wait, what are those multicolored dots?
There are so many of them and they are everywhere.
Base jumpers? Paragliders? Daredevils of some sort. This link is not for the faint of heart -- or those afraid of heights -- but it does show some good shots of how they do it. There are many more on YouTube.
Spending almost every weekend on the water growing up, I loved these shores. The water's edge pictures are very similar to what Medina Lake looked like in the 50's when we had our place there.
Well, not like this. We were in the hill country and there are Turk's Head and Mormon's Bluff, but they didn't exactly look like this.
They weren't very high and kind of looked like this. People would gather in the area to fish and to jump off the top.
I'm not sure what this is, but I thought it was worth a picture.
Here are some more pictures of the wild ones.
We got down as far as we were going to go and turned toward home. There was this interesting chateau right on the lake. We didn't get quite to the right angle for any of my pictures to correspond very closely to Paul Cezanne's painting.
So we continued on around the lake with more great views.
And too soon we were back close to the park and to the dock.
It was the perfect relaxing end to our last weekend in Europe. I would go there again, but perhaps with more energy to explore more of the countryside. The week here, week there idea is really catching on with me -- maybe 2 weeks here...
