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 have been refreshingly cool so far).

Anyway, yesterday — on my birthday and the French national holiday — we headed out for a relatively easy hike on the lower slopes of the Chartreuse range from the village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. We started on a grassy slope but soon entered a thick forest where the trail turned into a muddy and watery mess. Only when we reached a higher altitude the trail got drier. It could have also been because the soil type changed, at least the vegetation changed from mainly thicket to forest with mostly conifer trees. We finished the hike coming down a steep, and again very muddy trail, where I was bugged with a swarm of flies that could not leave me alone until we got out of the forest where there was some breeze. That is an aspect of Summer I absolutely hate: the flies! But it was a beautiful day, not too hot, since we were in the shade most of the time. And as a bonus we found some wild strawberries, which were a bit mushy from all the rain.