We spent the second week at Tomi’s parents’ house in Kangaslampi in Eastern Finland. Kangaslampi is another Finnish commune on the brink of extinction — the school was closed this summer. Its only hope is to cater to Summer tourism and visitors who have their Summer houses in the area. […]
In this summer’s vacation we spent three weeks in our native country. We spent the middle week working, and for the first and the last week we planned visits to lesser known (at least to us) nature destinations both in Helsinki and in the Savonia region of Finland. We also […]
This was the first time this summer that we had good weather for the whole weekend. At least it has felt like we’ve got nothing but rain this spring and the early summer. The downside of the arrival of sunshine is that it also brings hot daytime temperatures (the nights […]
The Tour of Sarrasine and The Dentelles of Montmirail This post wraps up our short vacation in Southern France, mostly Gard and Vaucluse departments. This hike traveled in Gigondas, that is a French wine Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) in Southern Rhône wine region, producing mainly red wine and little rosé. […]
Pont du Gard This was the last brutally windy day of our vacation. On the other hand the wind was blessing since the afternoon became really hot (it was +29°C when we returned to the car). Our destination of the day was Pont du Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct bridge […]
Les Angles (Gard) On the third day we wanted to avoid driving (and more sitting), so we searched for hikes in the neighborhood, and found an extensive network of trails starting just behind the house. After 200 meters we came up to an interesting cave system ‘Carrere du Trou de […]
May is the month of many mays: it may shine, it may rain, and it may even snow, and it may be cold or warm (borrowed from an Instagram post). Still May is one of the most optimal months for vacation here, since the weather is usually quite good, not […]
Starting in January 2024 France made it mandatory to separate food and other organic waste from general waste. For households this means that they need to take their bio waste either to collection bins provided by their municipality (that’s how it is organized in Grenoble) or to their individual or […]
I think that every year around this time I write that we’ve had the worst ever winter since we moved to France ten years ago. Again this year it has been mostly cloudy and we’ve received a lot of rain. Of course, this is good to ground water levels and […]