A day before the weather forecast promised sun and warm temperatures for Saturday (May 26), but we did not get any, or much of either. Instead we had strong gusty wind and cold rain on this first Spring hike in Southern Vercors, where we have not been before. It was […]
We returned to Serre Chevalier valley for the weekend (April 20-22) to enjoy a bit more winter weather and strengthen our newly (re)acquired skiing skills — it feels like every time we are on our skis we need to learn skiing anew, but luckily after each time it takes less […]
This winter we have prepared quite a few slow cooking dishes, mainly with some sort of meat. Especially after we started to patronize Intermarché, which sells cheap cuts of meat for very reasonable price, sometimes as low as 6 euros per kilo. The downside is that one has to buy […]
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 […]