We had five travel days left on our Interrail passes from the Summer Rails trip to Finland, and thought it would be a good idea to use them to visit the Black Forest (Schwartzwald) in South-western Germany for some relaxed hiking. And so we did. The Fall foliage was not […]
From Tampere we took the Serlachius shuttle to Mänttä to visit the Art Festival, the largest summer exhibition of Finnish contemporary art — our almost annual tradition since I don’t remember when, but it must have been before we moved to Singapore in 2008. This year’s theme was “On Being”, […]
Besides the flights between Bergamo and Helsinki the only thing we had fixed before this vacation were the tickets to Eppu Normaali’s farewell concert at the Ratina Stadium in Tampere. Originally they had two big stadium concerts planned, one in Helsinki and one in Tampere, but for nostalgic reasons we […]
We had just one whole day in Bergamo, since our outbound flight was in the evening of the second day. We took the funicular up to Città Alta, the medieval town surrounded by the 16th-century Venetian Walls. We walked through the old town and returned to the city center on […]
We returned to Trièves for bicycle touring, this time not just for one but four days. Like last time seven years ago, partial plan was to escape the heatwave in the city, but at 700-900 meters it was still very hot. Fortunately, unlike when walking or hiking, when riding you […]
Our bicycle touring has been on hiatus for a few years for various reasons, but we are resuming this much loved recreational activity this Summer. We are planning a 2 to 3-week tour later in the Summer or early Fall, probably La Via Allier — a new route following the […]
Our return flight from Madrid took off about thirty minutes after the scheduled time, but still landed in Lyon on time. Since bus connections from the airport to city center did not look very convenient, we were lazy and took a taxi to hotel Victoria in Perrache quarter on the […]
We had a lovely week-long vacation in Spain. Our two goals were to run the Zurich Rock’n’Roll Marathon in Madrid after 11 years, and visit our friends in Chinchón whom, likewise, we had not seen in 11 years. Except for a couple of navigational glitches, problems with locking the car, […]
We started the summer season with an easy hike at the lower slopes of the Vercors range near Grenoble. This was the area where we did our very first hike just three days after moving to Grenoble. Except for a short attempt for a wintry hike five years ago (the […]