Guingamp and the Countryside
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.
Category: Travel — France
Days Like This Are Why I Love to Travel
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 […]
A Perfect Day
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, […]
Poking Around Outside Montpellier
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 […]
Grotte de Clamouse Photos
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.
Montpellier Photo Gallery
The pictures from yesterday, in a much more user-friendly gallery format. Click on the first picture to start the slideshow. Enjoy!
Day Night Day
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 […]
More Adventures with HSBC!
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. […]
From Snow to the Seine
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 […]
Our Return from Paris: Incompetence, Thug Border Agents, and “Why Do You Live in France?”
We’re back in Sonoma County after a long, stressful, long, hard, long, hectic, hard day of travel, which started when I woke at 4:30 a.m. in Paris and ended 25 1/2 hours later when I finally climbed into bed in Santa Rosa. In between, it was a combination of stress, boredom, irritation, and anger … anger like I haven’t felt in a long, long while, at the rude, smug, arrogant, […]