CHAPTER 19
Descending from the lofty heights of the Pennine Alps, we cut west through Switzerland following the Rhone River, up and around Lake Geneva, and hooked left back across the border for a visit to Annecy, a lake side village known as the Venice of France, that dates to the time of the Romans and is nothing but charm.
Our route to Annecy happened to take us precariously close to CERN, the European nuclear physics lab, known for such things as inventing the World Wide Web, and more recently, discovering the Higgs Boson, the particle that is believed to give everything in the universe its mass. Needless to say I was slightly in a state of frenzy to stop by and see what it was all about, considering we were so close. Pulling into the parking lot though, I realized that three out of our four man crew were completely comatose from the long hot drive we had just undertaken. But, I wasn’t going to let that little detail hold me back… so, I cracked the windows, shut my door veeery quietly, and ran into the odd wooden globe shaped visitor center for a frantic 15 minute look around, with the hope of getting back to the car before anyone was the wiser. My plan mostly worked… and was totally worth it.
Arriving in Annecy, we were struck by the fact that an international animated film festival was taking place and the town was hopping- which belied the reality that we were able to reserve a hotel room on the main square of the old town, looking across at Annecy’s most iconic monument. We soon found out why this particular hotel had vacancy- the four of us spent a sleepless night huddled in the center of the bed trying not to touch the bed sheets we were laying on. The place was the dirtiest dump we have ever stayed at, ever, and we have stayed at a lot of bad places over the years. I can report, with my hand over my heart, that this was the one and only hotel at which Kacey has EVER not taken a shower. Considering there was literally nowhere else in town with an open room due to the film festival, our hands were kind of tied for that first night, but I promptly canceled the rest of our stay, to the immense consternation of the proprietor, which ended in an uncharacteristically heated confrontation the next morning, with many international phone calls to booking companies and credit cards, and was only resolved weeks later with Visa’s intervention. To be clear, we willfully paid for the night we stayed, but ol’ Antonio’s scam ended there, leaving him crying in a dirty corner of his scummy hotel, whining that he had been bested by the Ali Baba. Or at least that is how I imagine he reacted when his fraudulent charges got removed from his account.
Annecy itself was beautiful, and we had a great 22hrs there.
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