Beauty and the Beast Tour, 2023 - Day 6

 Moutiers to Annecy - c. 200 miles

A day when all the best-made plans went out the window...

We started out from Moutiers (not the prettiest town in the world), heading to a route I did on my last trip, 3 years ago. We drove up to Albertville and then set off up the D925 towards Beaufort, a lovely road bathed in sunshine. I briefly spotted a sign saying 'Ferme' but thought nothing of it...

At the Lac de Roselend, we stopped at the lone hotel on the lake with THE most stunning view:

Remembering the sign I had seen, I asked the waitress and, yes, the road was closed 1km further on! It had collapsed earlier in the year and they still hadn't repaired it. This explained why the rubbish tomtom satnav app my son was using said, "no route available" and explained why his Sygic app kept telling him to turn round and do a 60 mile detour! My very basic (but reliable) CoPilot app just happily let me route - it doesn't do any fancy live updates.

I really wanted to take my son up the 9,000ft Col d'Iseran, which meant taking that 60 mile detour. Fortunately,  turning round on these roads isn't much of a hardship, so we went back to Moutiers and then on up to Bourg St Maurice.

The road up to Val d'Isere was yet another great piece of tarmac and we saw several signs assuring us the Col d'Iseran was ouvert, so up we went, with the views getting scarier as we drove along edge-less roads with sheer drops to oblivion scaring my son into a reasonable pace (and the road was much bumpier than I remembered).

Their was also a heck of a lot of snow, with 6ft high banks along the top of the route (last time, I was here in July and there was hardly any). 

The top of the Col was sunny, cold and...CLOSED!! Yup, the lying French %#&*&*# hadn't bothered changing the signs to say the Col was ferme. It must have been a recent closure because none of the satnavs knew about it either and obviously, there was no explanation.

So, we headed back down (again, not a hardship) and I stopped at the same place I had 3 years ago, taking the same picture:

Definitely more snow a month earlier....spot the difference in Zedster? 

Without enough time to go somewhere very different, we set off for Annecy (going past Moutiers for the 3rd time!) and I found a little wiggly road to get there; the D911 up past the hamlet of Ecole and then the D5 through Gruffy (great name), which gave us our last taste of alpine twistiness before we start the journey home tomorrow.

No map route today as it was all over the place and I think we did around 200 miles, but I can't be sure.

Video of the day: