Not this time. And not the vacation I was looking forward to! The plan was to do some scenic hikes in lovely, sunny December weather. None of that happened. The weather was dreary and grey — we only had sun on one day of our six-day trip — luckily it […]
The dreaded November is over. My memory may fail me but I think that it wasn’t as bad as it has been in previous years we’ve lived here. Of course we had a considerable number of days with low hanging clouds but also fair amount of sunshine, and many beautiful, […]
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 […]
I use various filters and a special plugin in Facebook to filter out advertisements and sponsored posts from my feed. For some reason an ad for The Art of the Brick, a LEGO® art exhibition by an American artist (and a former lawyer) Nathan Sawaya, got through. We didn’t think […]
We spent this year’s Fall vacation in Bretagne. During the two-week trip we only saw a fraction of the region, though, and mostly the central and Southern part of it. Nothing was planned ahead of time, but the theme of the vacation turned out to be various man-sculpted or man-erected […]
We spent the extended holiday weekend in the area where most of town and village names sounded like they were taken from Asterix. The area, called la Dombes, is an undulating plateau in the department of Ain consisting of 1200 ponds or rainwater pools that are man-made, most of them […]
We have had (again) a long anticyclonic period that has caused inversion: a low hanging thick layer of clouds blocks cold and humid air near the ground, whereas the air above the clouds is warm and dry. This is very common in this valley at this time of the year. […]
For more than a week now we have been living in the fog, or covered in the clouds hanging as low as 700 meters, or both — it is hard to tell the difference really. Most days the visibility has been barely one hundred meters. Just in last two days […]
Those who know wines, especially French wines, likely are familiar with the wine growing regions such as Bourgogne, Côtes-du-Rhône, or Loire valley, but may not know that grapes are grown and wine produced also here in the Alps in Savoie and Isère departments. The nearest vineyards are less than half […]