Our race season ended yesterday with a half-marathon race on the bicycle path ‘La Docle Via’, from Saint-Saveur-du-Montagut to La-Voulte-sur-Rhône in Ardèche. La Dolce Via, built on a former railroad bed, follows the river Eyrieux, and it is probably the most scenic route we have been on, this time on […]
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 […]
Then it was almost the time to say goodbye to Finland. We booked the couple of last nights in a highrise in Kalasatama (only the 11th floor though) on the Eastern side of Helsinki, since we have spent a lot of time in the Southern and Western parts, and we […]
Besides the concert in Tampere, this was the part of our vacation that I looked forward to the most: almost two weeks at Tomi’s parents’ house in Kangaslampi in North Savonia region in Eastern Finland. As usual, we had the house to ourselves since the parents live in an apartment […]
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”, […]
There is not much to write about our short stay in Helsinki. Since our flight from Bergamo landed after midnight, we stayed the first night at the Scandic Helsinki Airport hotel. The next two nights we stayed at an Airbnb in Sompasaari. On our first morning there we went for […]
This Summer’s Interrail adventure took us first to Bergamo in Lombardy, Italy, via Milano Centrale. We spent two days in Bergamo before flying to Helsinki, where we spent two days as well. We had booked three nights in Bergamo, since our flight was in the evening and the late check-out […]
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 […]
We are going to do a four-day bicycle tour next (long) weekend in Southern Isère, and were planning to do the last “practice” ride this Sunday. Since recent days have been and still are very warm with strong gusty wind, even if the official heat alert ended a few days […]