In this paper, we present an effective simulated annealing algorithm for solving the capacitated vehicle routing problem (CVRP). The proposed algorithm combines the strong global search ability of simulated annealing with problem knowledge information in order to provide effective and competitive solutions. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the CVRP problem while section 3 introduces simulated annealing. Section 4 formulates the annealing CVRP and describes the formulation, cooling schedule, the neighborhood function, and the cost function. The CVRP annealing algorithm is described in section 5 while experimental results are presented in section 6. We conclude with remarks in section 7.