My sister-in-law Yvette has requested some pictures of food we’ve had. I haven’t taken many pictures of food, it seeming odd to me to aim the camera at a plate, but it turns out I do have three, one of a salad plate Suzie got one evening, one of the dark pancake-type thing filled with ham, cheese, and egg, whose name I now forget, and one of two sweets. Were […]
Since we’ve had to get up and get the boys to their tennis camp by 9 am each day — which requires us to go down the mountain, then across most of Grenoble — we’ve started to feel like regular commuters. It’s a pretty commute. First you pass this sign: Then you continue down a winding mountain road, with views of Grenoble below: Even after you come out of the […]
I think that I’ve changed my settings now so that it should be possible for you to get larger versions of the photos from either my Photobucket site (click here, or paste this into your brower’s address window: http://s58.photobucket.com/albums/g266/ssshupe/) or my Flickr site (click here, or paste this into your browser’s address window: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ssshupe/). As I said, some of the pictures really benefit from being seen in a larger view.
Better late than never … now, where were we? Driving, sadly, from Camogli to Asti. As I may have mentioned, we had such a good time in Camogli, and thought it was such a perfect vacation spot, that we were very depressed to have to leave. It didn’t help that it rained heavily during part of our trip, or that we had difficulty finding our hotel, or that we couldn’t […]
OK, I promised some rants, and here they area, all relating to driving. We have driven over 1200 kilometers in France and Italy, in big cities and small, small villages, and I have yet to see any road in as poor a condition as almost all of the roads in Sonoma County, especially those in the unincorporated area. Maybe I’ve become more sensitive to it because I’ve started bicycling more; […]
After travelling around so much, it is only in the last day or two that we have really come to appreciate the great natural beauty of the area around Grenoble. Notwithstanding my slightly underwhelmed post about the city itself, it is easy to see why people would choose to live here — in 30 minutes you can be in any number of places that seem like they are at the […]
Suzie had arranged to have the boys go to a tennis camp this week, so she and I had a free day all to ourselves yesterday. We parked the car in a residential area near the tennis camp, then spent all day walking through and around Grenoble. Grenoble is a strange conglomeration of old and almost new. It looks like it went through a boom in the 60s or 70s, […]
It would not, apparently, be a proper trip to Europe without a little dash of rowdy vache…. So we interrupt the description of our trip to Italy to bring you: Sunday morning we decided to drive north from our house on the Grande Route de la Chartreuse to a town called St. Pierre en Chartreuse. We were planning to visit the town and the nearby Couvent de la Grande Chartreuse, […]
We returned yesterday from five almost perfect, very relaxing days in Italy. To begin, a word of thanks to our green five-speed manual-transmission Renault Kangoo, a fine, fine vehicle, totally French-looking, very comfortable to drive, with more room on the inside than appears from the outside. I forgot how much fun it was to have a manual transmission and shift. When I get back, I’m going to try to talk […]
It is 9 p.m. and I am exhausted. We are leaving for Italy tomorrow early, and we still have stuff to do (and when I say “we” I mostly mean Suzie, since I’m sitting here at the keyboard). We had a memorable day today, thanks mostly to our neighbors here in Le Sappey, Jacques and Madeline. They invited us to a local fete, a big outdoor picnic (although that does […]