For the second week of our year-end vacation we escaped Grenoble that was plagued by inversion, a meteorological phenomenon in which low hanging clouds block the cold air underneath, while it is sunny and warm just few hundred meters higher. It was not only because of the temperature we got […]
This year was the fourth time we spent a week-long (19.-26.12.) winter vacation in Serre Chevalier valley in Haute-Alpes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. The last two vacations we took at the end of the season in March, but the first one just before Christmas. Even if that season […]
We had a questionable honor of being invited to Helsinki for work-related reasons in late November. It is the time of the year that people living in Finland don’t particularly enjoy, griping all the time about darkness and the drab weather, but even less us expats consider a prime time […]
It has been snowing on the mountains recently. Even if the official start of the winter season is about one month away at most of the ski resorts, Autrans on the Vercors declared on Friday that they will open the Nordic skiing tracks for the weekend. We had already decided […]
This past weekend was expected to be one of the last, if not the last one, with good, almost Summer-like weather: plenty of sunshine and warm daytime temperatures. So, we planned a hike in South-western Vercors on Sunday. This was a hike we’ve thought about for a while, since we […]
Old railway lines make perfect bike paths: they go from town center to town center, or from village to village, and even if not completely flat, they have gentle grades. The US has its Rails-To-Trails project, which is a nation-wide system, and France has La Dolce Via in the Ardèche […]
We have been fortunate to have had wonderful weather most of this Summer and the beginning of the Fall, and when it has been not so good it has happened during the weekdays, and weekends have been nice. And so it was again this past weekend. We dedicated Saturday to […]
We had another brilliant idea of riding one of the remaining sections of ViaRhôna that we have not visited before. We took an early morning train to Annecy and then spent over 20 kilometers to get out of the town and its vicinity. There were supposed to be two bike […]
The heat was back (and still is) after a few cooler days, and we took advantage of the nice weather going on another bicycle tour on Saturday (14.9.). Since we have fully explored the two nearby valleys — Grésivaudan and Isère — we looked for other options within a short […]