We returned to the heart of the Chartreuse massif for this extended Ascension Day holiday weekend. On our previous visit to the valley of two rivers Guiers (Vif and Mort) in March we discovered a bicycle path that runs at the bottom of the valley. Even if we walked most […]
The past week ended our winter season, and it also ended the winter sports season — more on that at the end of the post. We returned to La Vallée de la Clarée in Hautes-Alpes for one week, since our year-end vacation there was a disaster (we both were sick […]
We spent the extended weekend in Entre-deux-Guiers (Le Guiers Vif and Le Guiers Mort) in the Guiers river valley on the Chartreuse mountains. The main reason for the trip was our dentist appointments in the neighboring village of Les-Échelles on Monday, so we thought why not spend the whole weekend […]
This was a winter vacation we both have looked forward to since last Spring: a lot of skiing in the sunny and flat valley of Vallée de la Clarée in Hautes-Alpes near Italian border, but it turned out to be another wasted vacation because we both were sick. We did […]
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 […]
Usually in Helsinki we stay in quiet, old neighborhoods as close to the city center as possible. That’s what we did this time for our first stay, but for the final stay we booked an Airbnb apartment in Vuosaari, the Eastern terminus of the metro line. Early in our vacation […]
We only spent one night at Tomi’s family’s summer house. In hindsight, after learning that the internet worked there just fine, we should have spent more time there. On the other hand, spending all those rainy and thundestormy days on the small island would have been a lousy idea, since […]
We spent the second week at Tomi’s parents’ house in Kangaslampi in Eastern Finland. Kangaslampi is another Finnish commune on the brink of extinction — the school was closed this summer. Its only hope is to cater to Summer tourism and visitors who have their Summer houses in the area. […]