Pic Spocket

After my work in the south of France, I headed to Grenoble to join Corinne and pass some time with her family. Corinne’s mother was kind enough to show us around a bit. One afternoon, we went for a walk in the garden of Vizille’s castle. Few presidents of the republic lived there, but it is now the home of the French Revolution Museum. We were a bit too late to visit the museum though.

More pictures of Vizille.

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Another day, we took a day trip to Hauterives to see the ‘Ideal Palace’ built by Ferdinand Cheval, a French postman. He started in 1876 and he spent 33 years of his life building it. It is now regarded as a piece of art.

More pictures of the Ideal Palace.

On our way over there, we stopped at an Ostrich Farm. This was quite interesting. Corinne bought an empty Ostrich egg and brought it back home. She looks at me with fear in her eyes every time I dare touching it… She considers me to be quite clumsy…

More pictures of the Ostrich Farm.

On our way back from hauterives, we stopped at Tournon-sur-Rhone for a cup of coffee. There was a nice church there.

We reached the medieval village of St-Nazaire-en-Royans about an hour after sunset. We stopped on the road before for a nice view of the village and the aqueduct reflecting in the water. The aqueduct is 35 m high by 235 m in length. The picture would have been much better half an hour before, when there was still light in the sky.

More pictures from Tournon and St Nazaire.

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We also went to visit Corinne’s sister in the French Alps. She lives in Villard-Dessus, very close to Seez and Bourg St-Maurice. We stayed 4 days, 2 of which we passed on the ski slopes. The ski experience in the Alps is quite a bit different from where I come from in Quebec City where the slopes are quite short. I do not have many pictures from there since I did not carry the camera much for these few days.

More from The Alps (pocket camera)

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Few days before the end of our vacation, we passed a day with our very good friends Lucia and Jean-Luc. We took a nice walk to see the castle ‘Chateau du bon Repos’ in Jarrie where they live. This was a very nice setting too. We had a great evening together.

More from this castle.

All the pictures from the trip are available in the ‘travel’ section of the photo gallery.

I posted few days ago the pictures from my first 2 weeks in France. During my work weeks at Eurocopter, I stayed in the city of Aix en Provence, historic capital of the Provence region. It is a pretty nice city. It is also well known to be the birthplace of the French painter Paul Cézanne.

I did not get a whole lot of opportunities for pictures because at this time of the year, after the 1 hour drive back from the Marseille area where I worked, the sun was setting already.

More pictures from Aix en Provence.

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As mentioned before, during my first weekend I visited the city of Gordes. This medieval village is built on the flank of a mountain overlooking a large plain. This is quite special to see and it’s got a “cachet”. I passed a few hours there and had lunch outside on a terrace, without a jacket. It really felt like spring during my stay in France. It was sad to go back to winter weather in Canada a few weeks later…

More pictures from Gordes.

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Not too far from there was the city of Avignon, which I visited before in ’97. This is a nice place too and decided to go again. This is also medieval in style. The city is very well known for the “Palais des Papes” (below) where the Popes lived in the 14th century. Also well known is the “bridge” from the children song. However, this is not a bridge anymore: only 4 arches are left from the original 22 due to floods.

More from Avignon (City).

I stayed until after dawn, where I got some very nice pictures of the bridge after sunset.

More from Avignon (Bridge).

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On the following day (Sunday), I went hiking the the Calanques area between Marseille and Cassis. This area also called “Massif des Calanques” is a 20 km long by 4 km deep area long the coast where many of these geologic formations can be found. I started my hike from the forest of La Gardiole.

The hike was quite strenuous given my actual fitness shape (I’ve added a lot of weight in the last few months). This was pretty much walking up and down hills all day. What did not help, and that’s pretty funny, is the following: I had prepared a plan for the day on a hiking map. The trails were color coded and every time you would arrive at an intersection, there was a sign on a rock to tell you which way to go. Few times in the morning I seemed to cross paths at unexpected times. Later on, I cross a blue path, which is not possible for the area I think I am currently. Look at the map, figure I must have missed a turn and readjust my plan.

It is only after 2/3 of the day went by that I finally realize that I have been completely misinterpreting the signs on the rocks. A sign like this:

…which I thought was an arrow head pointing to the left path for the orange trail was in fact a sign to go to the right!!! The whole day I was always picking the wrong turn!!! Can I tell you how stupid I felt! So anyway: I ended up doing a huge detour. I was telling my self that the view would better be good to compensate for all that effort.

Few minutes later, I was standing in front of a magnificent view at the calanque of Eissadon. Once again, it’s hard to get a real feel of the place just from a picture. On that picture below, I am inches from a precipice of several hundred meters. You have to be careful with each steps!!

A little bit later, I also reached a point of view for the calanque of En Vau. Once again, I am a few inches from very impressive overhang here!

More pictures from the hike.

Many more pictures of this trip can be found in the Travel section of the Photo Album.

France Jan 2008

More to follow in the next post.

We are back from France! I passed 2 weeks working at a customer called Eurocopter, located in the area of Marseille near the French Riviera Coast. I was there to give some training. Everything went very well and the people over there were very friendly. We had some good laugh about the difference between ‘Canadian French’ and ‘France French’.

Then we passed a few days in the Grenoble area in Corinne’s family before heading for the Alps to visit her sister and hit the Ski slopes. We skied at “La Rosiere”, a nice site that communicates with Italy, “La Thuile”. My returned was delayed by a week because I was diverted to our Headquarters in Germany for one week for a machine acceptance.

During the trip, there was many photo opportunities. I just started looking through the few hundreds of shots to sort and adjust them. I should be able to post some in the coming week. In the meantime, I posted 3 panoramic pictures I have made on the first Saturday I had free during my stay in France.

I visited the village of Gordes, known as one of the most beautiful village of France. It is a mountain village in the Vaucluse department.

Not so far from there was the city of Avignon, really well known for the French children song about its bridge. I captured 2 panoramas of the bridge: about an hour before and after sunset.

To be continued…