May 31, 2025
Annecy to La Clusaz
Even though we had only a short ride planned for today to allow for a bigger ride tomorrow, we decided on an early start. Hotel des Alpes opens its breakfast buffet at 7 and we were there at 5 past, the first. We packed up, got our bikes from the cellar, and were riding by 9.
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We started on the lakeside cycleway, which happily wasn’t busy. It was also nice and cool in the morning.
The route as planned was quite straightforward: take the cycleway for a little more than 4 km then turn onto D909/Route de Thônes, which is designated a greenway as far as Col de Bluffy (there was a sign but I rode right by). The painted cycle lane ended at the turn onto Route de Menthon, which we took. This was 3 km of blissful riding on a narrow road in the shade (the day was heating up), on smooth asphalt with no cars today (closed to cars due to an ultra race but bikes permitted). Sadly, after passing through Alex, we were on D909 again, but the painted cycle lane had also reappeared.
This road would probably have been fine had it not been the Saturday of a sunny long weekend. We should have taken the first opportunity to escape for a while, at Thônes, but we didn’t and the traffic increased. We had another opportunity at Les Villards-sur-Thônes and we took it, but it returned to D909 a couple of km before Saint-Jean-de-Sixt. A quick snack break and then a final few km brought us to La Clusaz around noon.
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I always edit our routes to take us right to our lodgings if we’ve made the booking before leaving home. I did that for this one, but RWGPS took us to the wrong place. We couldn’t see our hotel so I put the address in Apple Maps and got back on my bike. Meanwhile, Al put the address in Google maps and put his phone in his pocket, with voice navigation on. Riding in front, I could hear the Google voice telling him to go back to where we’d been. But he followed me further up the hill to the correct turn, where we now saw direction signs to our hotel. We saw later that both Google and RWGPS had taken us to the bottom of a long flight of stairs that pedestrians could climb up to the street containing Hotel Beaulieu and others.
We were really early! Check-in was at 5 but Hotel Beaulieu has a (more expensive) sister hotel right next door where the reception is consolidated. Hotel Carlina also has a pool available to guests of both hotels. So today, instead of quickly changing into street clothes in a very dusty garage, we had a swim and a shower before heading out to find some lunch.
After lunch, we wandered the village for a while. La Clusaz is the kind of place the designers/promoters of Whistler were aiming for. I wondered how many taxpayer-funded research junkets took place…
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6 days ago
Ww returned to our hotel some time after 4 and our room was ready.
I’d booked the least expensive room type, which specified “no view”. Fine by us since we are spending most or all of our days outside among the views.
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We went to a bistro attached to Hôtel Le Christiania for dinner and it was good. We left just as a thunderstorm was starting but didn’t get too wet on our quick-walk back. Luckily we’d move the clothesline inside and closed the windows before we left!
Tomorrow’s plan depends somewhat on tonight’s weather but we suspect (hope?) the storm will blow through quickly.
Today's ride: 34 km (21 miles)
Total: 455 km (283 miles)
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