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 […]
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 […]