When we were investigating places to stop on our journey between Paris and Venice, a lot of the names of French towns were new to me.

I had never heard of Annecy but thought, yeah, we’ll give it a go for three nights.

It is one of the prettiest places I have ever visited. The Old Town (Vieille Ville) in the centre (where we were lucky enough to get a sweet apartment) has the charming canals, bridges and car-free cobbled streets of Venice…but with the backdrop of a 12^th century castle which once housed the counts of Geneva in one direction, and turquoise Lake Annecy fed by the French Alps in the other. The pastel buildings and the little flower boxes along the pathways made the town look like a Brothers Grimm fairytale.

The Europeans sure know how to do summer holidays right. It’s so much more than sunburns and BBQs. It’s food, ice-cream, bike riding, paragliding, pedal boating, swimming, horse riding, canyoning, shopping, lake cruising, markets all in the one place. The lake is enormous…big enough to host the thousands of international tourists that had come to visit, but it felt welcoming and relaxed. There were enough eateries to comfortably feed everybody, with options from local Swiss-inspired Savoy specialties (I tried the tartiflette, which was basically a fancy potato bake), to amazing woodfired pizza, quick and easy baguettes, and rainbows of gelati.

We got our adventure on across our few days; hiring bikes to ride around part of the lake one day, and canyoning (abseiling down waterfalls and climbing over rocks and through the forest) on another.

When Paul from Terreo Canyoning asked if we were ready and excited to get going as we wet suited up at the bottom of Angon canyon, I straight up replied “no.” While I like to consider myself semi-adventurous, thoughts of dropping (trauma remaining after bungy jumping in New Zealand which I hated), or cracking my or my family’s heads open (just a basic parental concern) were concerning me somewhat. Paul looked me square in the eye and told me we’d be okay. With typical St.Clair luck, the other four that were set to join us pulled out last minute (hooray!), so it was just us, as well as the instructor’s 17 year old nephew Charles, who seemed just as in awe of his uncle’s agile (and frightening) navigation of the canyon as we were.

We were impressive though. We slid though vertical rock crevasses filled with water; abseiled 35metres down the Angon waterfall; and Avalon and Cam took giant leaps into the crystal mountain water.

You can book various adventure activities through Terreo here.

Annecy, a definite 10/10, must-visit destination.