This weekend was probably one of the last chances, if not the last, to go skiing around here. Even if there is still quite a bit of snow, like in Chamrousse today, the skiing stations will be closing in early April. We had to climb quite high to reach the […]
Again this winter we spent a one-week vacation in Serre Chevalier valley in Hautes-Alpes (Mar 17-24). This time we stayed in Le Monêtier-les-Bains at the altitude of 1500 meters. According to the schedule, the bus ride from Grenoble to Serre Chevalier takes about two hours. It took us ten hours. […]
I attended a one-day workshop on Emotional Intelligence and Social Robots at Liris (Laboratoire d’InfoRmatique en Image et Systèmes d’information) in Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1. There was not much emotions involved, but most of the talks revolved around social dimension of robotics, such as human-robot interaction, shared experiences, developmental […]
We still have not bought the skis, so we thought that snowshoeing would be a nice alternative. We’ve only done it once before in Hokkaido, but not on maintained tracks but in steep unbroken snow and heavy snowfall. So, we planned a trip to Vercors this past Sunday, since the […]
This past weekend we visited Lyon to fulfill our civic duty to vote on the first round of our presidential elections. We certainly would like it better if our elections were at some other time of the year than January; the weather was miserable, cold, and it rained all the […]
Tomi’s parents stayed with us for a week before Christmas. We rented a car and took them to all three mountain ranges around Grenoble. First, we took them on Vercors range, and drove from Villard-de-Lans to Pont-en-Royans through the gorgeous gorges of the Bourne river. We got a bit lost […]
We spent four days attending the third biathlon world cup of the season in the village of Le Grand Bornand in Haute-Savoie department in France. We did not stay overnight in the village but in Annecy about 20 kilometers away, and commuted to the stadium every morning and back […]
Every four years that we have been here the winter’s first and only snow has fallen in October and November. This year it came on the first of December. It has also always melted away in a day.
We still had Dent-de-Crolles (2062m), the second highest peak on the Chartreuse range, to summit. It is just twenty meters shy of the highest peak Chamechaude (2082m), which we have climbed four times. Both climbs start at the altitude of about 1400 meters, but this was a bit trickier, both […]