On Tuesday, I got a late start due to getting, and reacting to, some undesired news. The road itself started pleasantly. Then a slog along a divided highway for a bit (sometimes unavoidable). Naturally no pictures of that, but here’s a pretty flower from a rest stop. Then off the highway into the Jura. It was fun to ride when I got away from other vehicles, but not all that exciting scenerywise (usually curvier than this!). Then a steep decline…
Many years ago, my parents hitchhiked around Europe with me and my sister, then almost 3 and less than 1. They hadn’t planned on hitchhiking – they bought a car in Amsterdam and planned to drive to visit my grandparents during my grandfather’s sabbatical in Nice. But the car broke down soon after they bought it, and being the early 70s, hitchhiking was the next best thing. At the time, my sister and I shared a passport and my father…
Maybe buying a tent called “Waterfall” wasn’t such a hot idea. Maybe it somehow cursed us. Ridiculous idea maybe, but hard to avoid when Libertario tells you this is the most rain he’s ever seen in May in all of his 60 years. The trip started well. We made it from DutchBoy’s parents’ house to Italy much the way we’d planned, with an overnight in Colmar, France. Around Lugano, Switzerland, DutchBoy remembered that his aunt and uncle had very much…
There’s a reason we tend not to make reservations. The plan was to spend two days getting down to the South of France, spend a week there and spend two days coming back. Only that last part ended up being true. (see the map at the bottom of the post for our route). The reason for this vacation was that DutchBoy had Thursday and Friday the 21st and 22nd of May off because of Hemelvaart (which sounds cooler than Ascension…
When people asked where we were going on vacation, we pointed vaguely east and said “that way.” But even though we didn’t know exactly where we were going, we were determined to leave Wednesday night, 20 August. Of course, because it was us, that turned into very, very late on Wednesday. It didn’t matter so much since our first step was Dutch Boy’s parents, from whom we were borrowing a bigger tent. We got there late and only didn’t wake…