Winter wonderland
Every four years that we have been here the winter’s first and only snow has fallen in October and November. This year it came on the first of December. It has also always melted away in a day.
Weather
No snow! Pas de neige!
Another attempt to find snow for skiing. Did we find any? No. And how could there any be with the afternoon temperatures recently reaching mid-teens? The weather forecast promised a cloudy day, but as soon as we were on the Vercors plain, the sun came through the clouds, and we […]
Spring has sprung
We migrated this blog from Amazon Web Services to GoDaddy just recently. Hopefully nothing got broken in the process. Other than that there has not been much activity here. We’ve been sick on and off, especially Tei, since our Interrail trip to Spain(*) in November; nothing severe, not even fever, […]
Cervières — in search of snow for skiing
We booked another weekend escape from polluted Grenoble in the little village of Cervières (pop. 183 in 2014) in the department of Hautes-Alpes. We stayed in a small cosy studio, heated by a pellet stove, on the ground floor of an ancient building (seen below in the far end of […]
Chambéry and The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
People say that Chambéry is a boring town. How can it be when it has (at least) two great beer bars and hosted The Ukulele Orchestra of the Great Britain at Espace Malraux. The latter was our reason to visit the town in mid January. The weather was not. We […]
Second week of winter vacation
For our second week of Winter vacation we returned to Grenoble. The snow situation was no better around the town, but there was a strange meteorological phenomenon going on, known as inversion: the temperature increased with altitude causing the low-hanging clouds to block pollution close to the ground. For the […]
Winter vacation in Serre Chevalier
We spent one week (Dec 17-24) Winter vacationing in Serre Chevalier valley in Hautes-Alpes, a two-hour bus ride South from Grenoble. We stayed at chalet studio in La Salle les Alpes/Villeneuve at the altitude of 1400 meters. This sad little snowperson epitomizes our winter break. It was a lovely week, […]
Second winter hike — Le Sénépy
This hike was quite different from the last weekend’s in so many ways. First, we were much better prepared for the chilly weather. Second, we had a lot of sun as we climbed to the top of the mountain staying mostly on open slopes (which also exposed us to strong […]
First Winter hike — Le Désert en Valjouffrey
Le Désert is the last village in the Valjouffrey valley at 1275 meters, a perfect Sunday (Dec 4) getaway from Grenoble’s foggy and polluted air. As always in Winter months when starting driving from the town, we hit the clouds near Vizille, but soon after climb over them. We never […]