We here in France have been in home confinement for three weeks now, since the French government extended the lockdown by two weeks. The regulations are still the same: we are allowed to leave home only for necessary shopping and to do physical individual exercise once a day for one […]
The snow situation near here has been quite poor this winter, so we booked our last week of winter vacation in Les Saisies, Savoie department, which has been much more fortunate with snow. Today our plans received a major blow as following the prime minister’s speech yesterday, the ski resorts […]
After returning from the Biathlon World Cup in Antholz-Anterselva last Spring, we bought tickets to this year’s World Championships, and began a long wait to revisit this lovely area in South Tyrol (Alto Adige) in Northern Italy. This time it was quite different, though: there were far more races and […]
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 […]
This year was the fourth time we spent a week-long (19.-26.12.) winter vacation in Serre Chevalier valley in Haute-Alpes department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region. The last two vacations we took at the end of the season in March, but the first one just before Christmas. Even if that season […]
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 […]
It has been snowing on the mountains recently. Even if the official start of the winter season is about one month away at most of the ski resorts, Autrans on the Vercors declared on Friday that they will open the Nordic skiing tracks for the weekend. We had already decided […]
Old railway lines make perfect bike paths: they go from town center to town center, or from village to village, and even if not completely flat, they have gentle grades. The US has its Rails-To-Trails project, which is a nation-wide system, and France has La Dolce Via in the Ardèche […]
We have been fortunate to have had wonderful weather most of this Summer and the beginning of the Fall, and when it has been not so good it has happened during the weekdays, and weekends have been nice. And so it was again this past weekend. We dedicated Saturday to […]