The bottom line after our first full two days in the new apartment in La Rochelle: Jetlag Triumphs! Especially when the two days haven’t been restful. Day 1 was dedicated to returning one rental car and getting another one. The big Peugeot 5008 that we’d gotten at the airport in Paris and driven to La Rochelle had to be returned by 11:30, and our new rental had to be picked […]
You know the saying, you can take the boy out of Iowa but you can’t take France out of the boy. Or something like that.
We got up this morning not knowing what we would be doing during the day. After some research and back and forth, we decided to drive to something called Le Sillon de Talbert, a 2-mile long, 100-yard wide spit of sand, gravel, and pebbles extending into the English Channel. Looks interesting, right? It took about 35 minutes to get there from Paimpol. We found the parking lot and walked on […]
Prelude We came to La Rochelle in large part because our two good friends, Alain and Isabel, live here. They are warm, welcoming, interesting, and funny. In turn they introduced us to another warm, welcoming, interesting, and funny couple, Daniel and Danielle. He was an urban planner for the city of La Rochelle, and she worked (effectively) for a non-profit. A lot like me and Suzie. One evening last week, […]
When Suzie and I travel, we love to just poke around, sometimes going to places that aren’t perhaps on the top of the tourist to-do list, just to see what we might find there. Today was one of those poke-around days; we ended up in a place we’d never heard of when we started the day. The first stop was, in truth, on the tourist list: the Château de Flaugergues, a […]
This was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a visit to the Clamouse cave about an hour outside of Monpellier. Located on the side of a gorge cut by the River Heurault, the cave consists of a number of enormous interlocking chambers containing truly unbelievable geologic formations. Alien, stunning, totally unexpected, awe-inspiring. Click on the first picture to start a slideshow.
The pictures from yesterday, in a much more user-friendly gallery format. Click on the first picture to start the slideshow. Enjoy!
We’re back from Paris, not particularly happy, moderately jetlagged. A nice flight somewhat ruined at the end by the failure of the jetway operator at SFO to come back from his break on time, resulting in us all standing on the plane after an 11-hour flight for an additional 30 minutes until a replacement jetway operator could be found (something that I could see happening at 2 a.m. but not […]
We love France, we really do. But there are aspects that are, shall we say, less robust than in the U.S. One of these is the quality of service personnel in non-retail contexts. (The service personnel in shops, stores, and restaurants, in contrast, are fabulous — almost always helpful and friendly and efficient.) The worst, in our experience, are banks, and we had yet another example the past two days. […]
We’d intended to stay in Les Saisies until Saturday, then drive to Lyon and take the TGV to Paris. That plan changed when the weather forecast called for up to three feet of snow and blustery winds for Friday and Saturday, due to a big storm associated with a cold front moving across Europe. About 5 p.m. on Thursday, the snow started falling, and by the time we were ready […]