We booked our year-end skiing vacation in Les Alberts in Vallée de la Clarée in Hautes-Alpes well ahead of time when skiing conditions still (or already) looked very promising (the same place, but not the same apartment, we stayed in December last year and then again in March) . Then […]
The day following our last hike in Kotkatharju, we took train from Pieksämäki to Helsinki, where we spent a couple of days doing final purchases and picking up our eyeglasses. Then we flew back to Pisa, and spent two nights there. In Pisa we stayed in central but relatively quiet […]
The day following our first hike we took an extended weekend off from work — Monday was the French National Day — and visited Tomi’s family’s summer house on the island in Viljolahti, about a 22-kilometer drive and 10-minute boat ride away. The lake’s water level was so low that […]
This was a winter vacation we both have looked forward to since last Spring: a lot of skiing in the sunny and flat valley of Vallée de la Clarée in Hautes-Alpes near Italian border, but it turned out to be another wasted vacation because we both were sick. We did […]
In November we have had two back-to-back long weekends, All Saints Day a week ago and the Armistice this past weekend. We spent the former in Lyon, and this time escaped to the Vercors mountains, maybe the first time since we moved to the opposite direction from Grenoble. The plan […]
Exceptionally, we did not spend the first day in the town, but went for a hike from the port of Vannes (I don’t remember why we made this decision — maybe the weather forecast for that day looked more promising). Actually we had planned a lot longer hike (~18K) that […]
Carnac is known for its rows of menhirs (standing stones) and dolmens (portal tombs), but before we started our hike to them, we made short tour in the town. As said, Carnac is known for its sites of rows of standing stones (in some other parts of the world similar […]
Then it was time to move on again. Our next destination was Quimper, which we chose for no particular reason other than it being smaller than the port town of Brest. On our way to Quimper we stopped by in the town of Huelgoat (Finistère) to hike in its mythical […]
Next our rental vehicle took us to the small town of Carhaix-Plouguer (Finistère), our home for the next three nights. We arrived early and had quite a long wait before we could check in at our Airbnb apartment. For some reason several hosts in this trip were quite inflexible with […]