There are something called Sept Merveilles du Dauphiné (Seven Wonders of Dauphiné); they are natural or man-made sites or monuments of special interest or significance located in the historic Dauphiné region (in Isère department). On today’s hike we visited the sixth one ( see the list below for the first […]
Another weekend getaway took us to the charming town of Le Puy-en-Velay in Haute-Loire department, about 200 kilometers west of Grenoble. When driving there we had quite a variable weather from sunshine to constant rain with occasionally heavy downpour, but at the time we reached Le Puy the rain had […]
Let us see if this past weekend was what is left of the Summer in the French Alps. This week is expected to bring a lot of rain and temperature drop of 15° Celsius, even snow below 1000m of altitude! What a Summer it has been! The whole corona virus […]
Next week we are leaving for another bike tour in Central France. Today we did a short (37.4km, 3h) recreational practice ride exploring the new bike path along the river Drac, South of Grenoble. It was a very comfortable ride, but we wish there would have been more picnic spots […]
This Saturday took us to The Shrine of Our Lady of La Salette (Sanctuaire Notre-Dame de La Salette), the site of the Marian apparition to two children in 1846 in La Salette-Fallavaux. The Sanctuary, which has a Basilica, a Chapel, and a hotel for pilgrims, is located at about 1800 […]
For the second week of our year-end vacation we escaped Grenoble that was plagued by inversion, a meteorological phenomenon in which low hanging clouds block the cold air underneath, while it is sunny and warm just few hundred meters higher. It was not only because of the temperature we got […]
We had a questionable honor of being invited to Helsinki for work-related reasons in late November. It is the time of the year that people living in Finland don’t particularly enjoy, griping all the time about darkness and the drab weather, but even less us expats consider a prime time […]
Saariselkä is more than thousand kilometers North of Helsinki and it took us 12 hours to get there; first by train to Oulu (5h30m), where we changed to another train for Rovaniemi (2h15m). From there we took a bus to Saariselkä (3h). We arrived late in Lapland but it was […]
We enjoyed the sunny and warm First of May hiking on the Vercors. This time our destination was a sightseeing platform Vertige des Cimes that extends a few meters over the edge of the mountain with about 300 meters drop below. It is an easy hike away from the […]