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 […]
We booked a newly and very nicely renovated studio apartment on the sixth and uppermost floor of the apartment building in Roche Béranger in Chamrousse 1750 for three night this past weekend. We drove there early Friday evening and returned this Monday morning so that we could have two full […]
We returned to Briançon and Vallée de la Clarée in Hautes-Alpes to run the 10K race of the Névache – Briançon half marathon event. We drove to Briançon in the Friday afternoon via the Fréjus tunnel — it was a smooth and pleasant ride with almost non-existent traffic. On Saturday […]
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, […]