Category: Travel
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Flight day.
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No comments on Flight day.Yesterday was a big day. The weather was fine, and we had an appointment to keep at the base of the Aiguille de Midi. The Chamonix valley is surrounded by aiguilles, needles, spires of rock at the tips of the mountains close by. One of them is the “needle of noon,” I suppose a reference…
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Is this work?
Kinda lazy day. Only kinda. I got up early-ish in the morning, made a double Nespresso (two pods one after the other), and started working on my blog migration. You see, the text of the blog has moved over to WP, but the images haven’t really. As of right now, they are all still pointing…
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Monday: Disappointed kids. Because weather.
We had a plan for Monday that involved going up in the Aiguille de Midi gondola to the mid-station. We were in the act of gathering gear and putting on warm clothes, packing backpacks and locating granola bars, when we received information from the top: Not today. Too windy and cloudy up there. They may…
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Mass, velocity.
Simon had a rougher time sitting with us at Mass in Saint-Michel, the little, highly decorated church in Chamonix, than he did last time. I’d asked him to pack some books for him to look at in Mass—at eleven, and a fairly voracious reader, he still relies on “church books” not to get restless. His…
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We moved, part II.
The first part is here. After lunch we came around past Turin on the bypass and west toward the long Fréjus tunnel. Signs warned us that there was a backup leading up to the tunnel, which is something you just have to expect; maybe even more with Mont Blanc’s tunnel closed. It seemed to us…
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We moved.
We have stuffed all our things into the back of the rental car, an enormous (to us) Volvo SUV that Mark is not enjoying driving, and made our way a few hours inland, from that charming just-big-enough walkup over the top of an office with a temp agency and a one-person tutoring center, to the…
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Driving in town: not exactly tranquil.
Mark, Simon, and I took the train back to Nice this morning, just to pick up a rental car. The rental counter was easy, and we were helped by a friendly staffer named Jean-Félix (I introduced Simon, whose middle name is Felix, so they had something in common). We need a big SUV because we…
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One of the least dangerous places we’ve ever been.
Mark likes to tell a story from a trip to Rome he took without me, where some local he made English small-talk with warned him that he needed to stay away from “the dangerous parts of Rome.” Mark inquired what parts did he mean, and the gentleman leaned in and said, “You see, there are…
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You can’t take it (all) with you.
What makes a vacation? Are we on vacation every day here, or only on days (like today) when Mark isn’t working and we’re not doing school? At first I thought it was a half-vacation. Now I think, at least for me, it’s the whole time. + + + George Carlin did a bit called “A…
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Zones of time and place.
Let’s talk a little about jet lag, sleep, time zones, and energy. Also what we see and hear around us. In between, some irrelevant pictures from yesterday (and a brief video). We are seven hours ahead of home in Minneapolis. We got here via a very brief layover at JFK. Thus the “overnight” flight skipped…
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Cocteau/Taco.
I didn’t do my homework before coming here, so I haven’t learned as much about Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) as I ought. He seems to be one of those artists who has his hands in everything and who knows everyone. Wikipedia calls him a “poet, playwright, novelist, designer, film director, visual artist, and critic,” “one of…
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Miscellany.
Facebook took a few days to figure out it should be pushing me the Menton municipal page, which is too bad because I found out on the day after it happened that there had been a little wreath-laying ceremony, with a color guard and US/UK flags and national anthems, commemorating the 81st anniversary of the…
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