May 3, After breakfast on the lovely terrace of the hotel, a long travel day..from Nice to Annecy, near Geneva. There were a couple of options for getting there, the shorter distance - up thru mountains, not major highways and lots of curves or the longer way but quicker. In the end we took the long/quick way which was around 350 miles and 6 hours, average speed about 70mph. Max speed on most of the road is 85mph. The other way would’ve been about 300 miles but closer to 8 hours. Interesting scenery thru parts of France - specially the Provence area, high limestone, forested cliffs, and mountains, on thru some farm land, with the brilliant yellow flowers of the rapeseed crops, which when processed be chemically altered to make bio-diesel, which is likely to be a big substitute for fuel in the not too distant future in Europe. Speaking of fuel, it ain’t cheap here. We have a diesel Peugeot, and it costs approximately 1Euro per liter, or $4 gallon, tho we’ve been getting pretty good mileage I think. To date we’ve done 2600 kilometers (1800 miles) since we picked up the car in Rome on April 21.
Road tolls are incredibly expensive also. We arrived at our hotel, a former abbey, from the 13th century, lots of huge wooden posts and beams, and large comfortable rooms, with enough time to ride into the old city park and find a restaurant for dinner.....not an easy feat in Europe on a Sunday night, or for that matter on a Monday.....lots of places closed. Not enough business, at least until the summer hordes of tourists.
As for the old city being old.....the look of some of the buildings leaves no doubt about their age. In most of the oldest cities in and around the Italy and France we found that they’ve restricted auto traffic and made it all pedestrian only. Certainly much nicer sitting at an outside table when there isn’t the smell and sound of cars going by.