In Annecy

May 30, 2025

When I said yesterday that we “braved” the old town to go out for dinner, I wasn’t joking. It was solid with people, reminding us of Venice. We expected Annecy to be busy, but we didn’t expect anything like this. Compare the photo below from our 2017 trip, taken around 9:15 in the evening of June 27:

You can see the white tablecloths in the restaurant (there isn’t a huge mass of people in front), there are gaps where you can see the pavement, there’s only one person on the closest bridge.

Here are a few photos from our walkabout this morning:

So French-market. Local artisanal cheese on the left, mattresses and bedding on the right.

Market in Rue Sainte-Claire in the old town. It was actually more crowded last night without the market. There were more people where the market stalls are this morning.

We think the crowds are due to the extra-long weekend; Thursday was Ascension Day so many French citizens took Friday off and made a vacation of it. Annecy is a lovely place to visit when it isn’t clogged with tourists and the weather was fabulous though overly hot. Most of the voices we heard were French, with a few British accents. I heard a bit of Spanish and maybe some Italian.

We also like to look at bike shops. We visited Cyclable, where in 2017 they’d fixed my hub slightly damaged in transit, and Le Bon Wagon, a rather high-end shop.

We saw delivery of some new bikes, in boxes. A fellow brought the big box on foot from around the corner, entered through the front door, then carried the box up the narrow spiral staircase to the sales level of the shop.

On the sales level. Wouldn’t one of these be nice for the big climbs?

And we saw a few other things:

We decided to take the opportunity to have a proper sit-down lunch and all the restaurants on Google were clustered in the old town streets. We remembered our hotelier telling us in 2017 that Rue Sainte-Claire was the restaurant street, but we’d been trying to avoid it. Today we managed to get a table at Porte Ste-Claire.

Followed by moules marinières, very popular today in this city far from the sea. We shared this too and the amount of food was just right.

After lunch we walked up to the chateau and back down to the lake, where we lazed around in the shade of Jardins de l’Europe for a while before heading back to our tiny air-conditioned room.

We weren’t even aware that Annecy had a chateau, but clearly most visitors knew about it. We knew about the cycling!

We had decided on pizza as a less-expensive option for dinner and headed first to a pizzeria near our hotel. Unfortunately, a wailing child was already there and having had our lunch already so disturbed, we looked elsewhere. But elsewhere was either lined up or take-out only, so we ended up back here on our third pass, when the brat had finally departed. (As an aside, today was the first time we’d encountered poorly-behaving children in European restaurants. Maybe we’ve been lucky up to now? There have certainly always been many families with children in restaurants.)

Rate this entry's writing	Heart	12
Comment on this entry	Comment	5

Patrick O'HaraWhat do you think of the Hotel des Alps?
Reply to this comment
2 weeks ago

Suzanne GibsonI'm so happy it wasn't that crowded when we were there two weeks ago! It must be the long weekend. But the path along the lake was just a crowded as you described it.
Reply to this comment
2 weeks ago

Jacquie GaudetTo Patrick O'HaraWe had good memories so I chose it again. The location is good, the staff are nice, there is bike storage in the cellar, but the facilities are basic. I chose the least expensive class of room and it was small but the bed wasn’t against the wall. AC worked well and the room was quiet.
Reply to this comment
2 weeks ago

Scott AndersonAmazing to see it that busy, but we saw the same situation on a holiday weekend down in Termoli. Maybe also though the two weeks since we were there were enough to push it into high season.
Reply to this comment
2 weeks ago

Patrick O'HaraTo Jacquie GaudetThanks Jacquie.
Reply to this comment
1 week ago