La Tournette

More hiking in the mountains today. We drove to Montmin and set off on a walk up La Tournette, which is the tallest of the mountains that surround Lake Annecy. There’s a steep 6-hour round trip hike to the summit and back; there’s also a three quarters of an hour trek up the Chalet D’Alpe, where you can get a cold drink and enjoy the views over the lake and up into the mountains – guess which one we plumped for!? We did make a little side trip along a plateau to have lunch in the shade of some trees and an evocative rugged wooden cross on the hillside. At least that left us enough energy to walk down to the ‘beach’ at Duingt later (and for me to finally swim in the lake) though not enough to venture out later on to see if we could see the fireworks from this evening’s ‘Fete de Annecy’ spectacular (the fact that ’11 bands are gonna play’, according to the promotional material, kind of amusingly reminded me of the party that Murphy’s Law were going to have, though I’m sure that the Annecy gig is much more classy than a ‘Crucial Bar-B-Q!’) The other song in my head today was ‘Ford Mustang’ by Serge Gainsbourg – an obvious Gallic choice, I suppose, but possibly inspired by todays’ slightly treacherous mountain roads…