Unexcused Absences

Second half of February, 2018 — Italian Dolomites. After checking out of Val Gardena, we drove our rental car to Arabba and skied the Marmolada section of the resort, to the south of the town. Marmolada has several things to offer, including the largest vertical drop of any single ski run in the Dolomites (almost 6,000 vertical feet in 5.3 miles), plus an on-mountain museum devoted to the WW I fighting between Austria and Italy. It was conveniently on the route from Val Gardena to Cortina d’Ampezzo, the final stop of our European ski vacation.

Cortina d’Ampezzo as seen from our room

When we were planning this trip, I imagined skiing in northern Italy in late February under sunny skies, warm weather, and long lunches on sun decks of the countless on-mountain restaurants. Mother Nature, though, didn’t process that request, and we had some of the coldest ski conditions we’ve experienced. It was still exciting to ski at world-famous Cortina, we just missed out on the sun decks.

Cold weather rime ice

Cold afternoon in Cortina

Top station at Col Drusciè

A clear but very cold dawn

We were told several things by friends who had skied here previously; first, that people were more likely to walk around town showing off their fur coats than to actually saddle up for skiing (true), and second, that the town was expensive (also true). But Heather found us a nice top-floor apartment at a reasonable price, and the lift tickets were the same “Dolomiti Super-Ski Pass” that we used in Val Gardena, so the total cost for lift tickets were under 30 euros per day. That, plus our place had a kitchen, and there were a couple very nice supermarkets walking distance from our apartment.

The main church in Cortina

Cortina is actually three (or four, or six, depending on how you count) separate ski areas, and you can sort of move between them by bus. I say “sort of”, because while we did see buses out circulating around, it wasn’t clear at all from the published schedule when, or even where, to catch a particular bus. Sort of like Val Gardena, where every bus, whether local or regional, and whether eastbound or westbound, displayed the number “352”.

Fortunately, with our rental car we could go when and where we pleased. We spent most of our days in the Tofana area, which is home to the annual Women’s World Cup races. We visited the Lagazuoi section twice (or maybe it was three times), and the Faloria section twice.

At the Lagazuoi summit

Lagazuoi is home to possibly the single most beautiful ski run in the world. First you drive about 25 minutes west of town, then take a long, steep cable car to the 2800 meter high summit. After a few hundred meters, the slope splits to the right (back to the cable car) or to the left, which then winds down a long hidden valley, passes a couple restaurants (it is Italy, after all), and comes out at the “horse lift”. There is actually a place where, for a couple euros, you and 38 of your closest friends grab onto a long rope and get pulled, by a horse and sled, maybe half a mile along the valley floor, out to where you either take a chairlift to Alta Badia, or a bus back to the Lagazuoi cable car.

The cable car to Lagazuoi

The “horse lift” at the bottom

Part-way down the Lagazuoi piste

This area was also on the front lines in WW I, like Arabba and Marmolada that we skied previously, and the soldiers carved intricate galleries in the mountains that can be seen from the cable car. It is tragically ironic that the direct descendants of the soldiers who fought and died in brutal winter conditions 100 years ago are now likely sharing chairlift rides over the very same terrain. Lagazuoi also has, like most good European ski resorts, a proscribed circuit (in this case, the “Super 8), where you ski clockwise from the cable car summit down to the road, then across the road and clockwise through the “five towers” (also a battlefield) area.

World War I hardware

A chairlift on the Super 8 circuit

The Cinque Torri (five towers)

Unfortunately I was out of action for a couple days with a sinus infection, but Heather wasted no time in picking up three Italian boyfriends on the chairlift. They are all retired, and their daily routine is to catch first chair at Tofana, lap the steep runs near the summit until 10:30 sharp (“I hate skiing once the children come out”), then stop for their special hot chocolate at Bar Ristorante Col Taron. I say “special” because it is possibly the thickest, richest hot chocolate on the planet. It’s more like hot fudge in a mug. You can stand the spoon straight up and it won’t fall over.

Heather’s Italian “boyfriends”

The “special” chocolate at Col Taron

The upper track for the Women’s World Cup

Our next-to-last day had some rare mild weather, so we skied the Lagazuoi and Cinque Torre areas under sunny skies, then stopped for a long lunch on the deck at the Scotoni Hutte on the hidden valley trail. We had a perfect seat in the sun, and enjoyed a deer-meat ragu main course with Kaiserschmarrn (literally, “the emperor’s mess”) for desert, plus as a bonus they served Andechs beer (!) on draft.

Scotoni Hutte in the hidden valley

Kaiserschmarrn for dessert

Andechs on tap!

The hidden valley behind Lagazuoi

This wraps up our 6-week European ski vacation. Everything has been wonderful; getting pummeled by the German language in Austria, taking a ski lift that is pulled by horses, skiing all the circuits (the Weisse Ring in Lech, the Sella Ronda in Val Gardena, the Super 8 in Cortina), sampling the on-mountain restaurants in Italy, learning to queue (or I guess “un-queue”) in lift lines like the Italians. From here it’s a quick visit to Venice, followed by our flight home and a rapid turnaround before beginning our 2018 Bahamas cruise onboard our trawler, Miss Adventure.

Below the Tofana summit

Dusk as seen from our balcony

The afternoon scene at Scotoni Hutte

First half of February, 2018 — Italian Dolomites. A train ride south from Innsbruck, plus a bus ride east from Ponte Gardena, brought us to the Gardena Valley. Val Gardena is not actually a town, but three towns (Ortisei, St. Cristina, and Selva) at the north-western corner of the Sella Ronda, a 4-mile-diameter rugged plateau in the Italian Dolomites. Four interconnected ski areas circle the plateau (Alta Badia, Arabba, and Val di Fassa in addition to Val Gardena), and a ~21 mile long by 18,000 vertical foot circuit can be traversed on skis either clockwise or counter-clockwise around the region.

St. Cristina in Val Gardena

Our apartment was a small space in a chalet, nicely located in the center of town a 200m walk from a chairlift and a 50m walk from a major bus stop. The chairlift led to an under-used section of the resort, with very few routes in or out, so we had unmolested intermediate and difficult runs mostly to ourselves every morning, as a warm-up before we began our touring and eating adventures for the day.

A morning powder run on our secret slope

The rocks above St Cristina

Our village of St. Cristina

And speaking of eating… the Italian ski resorts have the correct focus, in this writer’s humble opinion. In the section of slopes to the north of St Cristina, a space equivalent in size to Vail’s Teacup and China Bowls, there were 12 (!) on-mountain restaurants. The equivalent section at Vail has… one, the Two-Elk Lodge. Just so you know I’m not exaggerating, the restaurants are Baita Pramulin Hutte, Baita Odles, Malga Neidia Hutte, Baita Cuca, Fermeda Hutte, Baita Daniel Hutte, Mastle Hutte, Rifugio Troier, Baita Sofie, Baita Gamsblut, Ristorante Seceda, and Baita Curona Hutte. This is one tiny corner of the skiable terrain, with only four of the 223 lifts covering the whole Sella Ronda. The Sella Ronda, as a whole, contains 138 slope-side restaurants. Ok, enough with the superlatives. Bottom line, Italians have clearly made eating the true focus of their skiing.

An on-mountain restaurant

Another on-mountain restaurant

Yet another on-mountain restaurant

After a few days of skiing within the western and northern sections of the connected resorts, the weather cooperated and allowed us to do the complete clockwise circuit. We took a bus up-valley to Selva, then rode a long gondola eastward to the pass at Dantercepies. From there we skied a long east-facing slope that took us all the way down into Alta Badia. It was a rather magnificent run in the bright sunshine, beneath the massive cliffs of the Brunecker Turm mountain peak to our south.

The rocks of the Sella Ronda

At Alta Badia we turned south, crossed the Tyrol/Veneto border, and continued with multiple lifts and runs into Arabba. This area was on the front lines of World War I, and Austrian and Italian troops dug extensive galleries into the sides of the mountains, from which they proceeded to shoot at each other for several years.

Somewhere on the Sella Ronda

The slopes go right up to the rocks

The pass at Dantercepies in the early morning (looking west)

We took a few side runs in Arabba off the official circuit route, since the terrain was too tasty to pass up. Once over Pass Pordoi, we skied down into the Val di Fassa ski area and took a few more laps off the circuit. We still made it back to Val Gardena, and the Malga Sella restaurant, around 1 pm for a late lunch. After working our way through the Gralba and Saslong sections of Val Gardena, we finished our circuit a few hundred meter walk from our apartment.

A slope-side chapel above St. Cristina

The rest of the week was spent trying to identify the best on-mountain eateries using Google and TripAdvisor, then checking them out in person. Our favorites over the two weeks of research were Fermeda Hutte, Sonnenhutte, and Malga Sella in Val Gardena, Rifugio Fodom in Arabba, Skihutte Las Vegas (?) in Alta Badia, and Col Pradat Hutte in Colfosco (with possibly the best mountain view of any restaurant anywhere).

Slopeside pizza at Fermeda Hutte

Skiing under the Grohmannspitze

A table with a view; lasagne at Col Pradat Hutte

Our second-to-last day we met up with a friend of a friend, Jean-Charles (from France), and his children, who were staying in Alta Badia at the aforementioned Skihutte Las Vegas. When I told the proprietor that we were meeting Jean-Charles for lunch, he clasped his hands as only Italians can, and exclaimed, “Ahhh, Juan-Carlos, our favorite customer! Let me find him for you.” It was really nice to meet him and his family, and finally put a face to the name of our mutual friend’s exchange student “brother” from many years ago. It was also more than a little embarrassing that, while we were looking forward to speaking French with them, he and his children spoke better English than we did.

With Jean-Charles. I didn’t get the memo about the obligatory green jackets

The best of Tyrol; slopeside pretzels

Welcome to Europe; a slope-side chateau

One final local business to mention; near the end of our stay, we walked a hundred yards up the road for a fantastic dinner at La Tambra pizzeria and steakhouse. It’s a bit confusing because upstairs is the pizza restaurant and downstairs is the steakhouse, although they apparently serve both menus in both places so you’re really just choosing ambiance when the hostess asks whether you want to sit upstairs or downstairs. Our meal was fantastic. We ordered some kind of meat-on-a-skewer sampler and could have easily stretched the portions to cover a steak breakfast the next morning as well as a steak lunch the following noon.

View of the Sella Ronda from way up high

The scenery in the Dolomites is like nothing we’ve ever seen. Even though it’s technically part of the Alps, the landscape is jaw-dropping. Several of the most beautiful ski runs we’ve ever taken are here in the Dolomites. The rock cliffs often seem to jut right up out of the slopes. If you come, bring your camera (and your appetite).

View from our room in the morning

View from our room in the evening

More mountain scenery

A few additional observations about northern Italy:

• In Tyrolian Italy (the Dolomites), a “guten tag” goes much farther than a “buon giorno”. English is the fourth language; tied for first and second are German and Ladin (the true local dialect that’s actually not far from old Latin), followed by Italian, followed by English.
• Tyrol definitely considers itself its own state (if not, unfortunately, a U.N. recognized country). They have their own foods, customs, and twist on the language (kind of like Texas).
• The lift lines are completely chaotic (I know, hard to believe in Italy), but right before you load the chair, everything seems to sort itself out and 98% of the time you ride with the person (or people) you want to, and very few chairs are under-filled when the lines are long. This inability of the rest of the continent to queue properly is the real reason the British are choosing to leave the EU.
• The bus schedules in Val Gardena were designed by a sadist. Every single bus, whether a local ski bus or a regional town-to-town bus, and whether east-bound or west-bound, displayed the number “352.” I am not making this up. I guess it simplifies life for the locals, who can just tell any inquiring visitor, “Take bus 352” without having to think at all about where they are actually going.

One more quick story about the buses. When we checked in to our apartment, we were given a bus pass that “covers all buses in the Valley, including the ski buses and the regional buses.” “Free of charge?” I asked. “Yes, all free.” So on our first day, we skied out to the far reaches of Seiser Alm, south of Ortisei. Once there, we realized it would take about 5 lifts and a couple hours to work our way back to town. “No problem,” I announced, “the map shows a bus that connects back to St Cristina.” And sure enough, there was a bus pulling up to the stop. So we hopped onboard, and the driver asked for 10 euros. I showed him my bus pass, but he said this bus was 10 euros. Heather speaks some Italian, so she said we were told the buses were free with the pass. “Oh yes, they’re all free… except this one.” Anyway, we were happy to pay since we had already skied 18 runs, 19.5k vertical feet, and 22 miles (according to the “Slopes” app on our phones).

After two weeks in Val Gardena, I took a bus back to Bolzano and rented a car for the final two weeks of our stay in Italy. We wanted to have the flexibility to ski at a different area on the way to Cortina (our final ski stop for this trip), and to have an alternative in case the pass to Cortina was closed by snow and we had to take the long way around (~4hrs). Fortunately, the weather cooperated, and I’ll cover our stay in Cortina in my next post.

Free-form ice sculpture in Ortisei

Early morning in Alta Badia

Another look at the ice sculptures

St. Cristina

Another on-mountain pizza

The slope-side chateau

Val Gardena is famous for wood carving; a larger-than-life nativity scene

Second half of January, 2018 – Austrian Alps. In the quest to eventually bring our website back up to the present, it’s time to switch gears from our French canal-boat adventures and travel back to Europe for some skiing. Practically everyone we spoke to, when we said we wanted to ski in Austria, said we had to go to Lech. So off we went for two weeks as the opening act in a 6-week European ski vacation.

The twin areas of Lech-Zürs, pronounced by the locals as “Leshch-Zoeurs” as only a native German speaker can (side note; the Germans seem to add extra letters when pronouncing their words, whereas the French proudly ignore up to a third of the letters in their words), are sort of the Vail/Beaver Creek of Austria. The prices and level of luxury are comparable, and the “fake European walking village” of Vail appears to have been lifted almost directly from the real European walking village of Lech.

Lech; a real European walking village

The day we arrived — flight to Zurich, train to St. Anton, bus to Lech, taxi to our chalet — the Alps were in the final days of a serious, multi-day snowstorm. It was questionable whether we’d even make it to our room; the road to Lech goes right through some serious avalanche terrain, and it’s not uncommon for the village to be completely cut off by the threat of slides. As it happened, our bus made it through, but the following day both roads into Lech were completely closed for about a day.

Forecast for 1.5m of snow

Road closures on either side of Lech

A serious snowpack

After the storm

The good news about a snowstorm is of course the fresh snow. The bad news about a snowstorm in the Alps is that, because the slopes are mostly above tree-line, the falling snow and clouds create white-out conditions, where you can’t tell up from down. So our first day we were limited to the lower slopes near the village, where there were a few trees and some houses to use as points of reference.

Snowpack on a roof

Cablecar to Oberlech in the snow

The upper mountain in Lech

But the bonus is that once the storm cleared (after dropping around 1.5 meters of snow over 5 days), the entire, massive connected area of Lech-Zürs/St. Christoph/St. Anton/Warth/Schröcken offered up magnificent skiing conditions. As an added bonus, most of the main chairlifts and gondolas in Lech-Zürs have heated seats. I am not making this up.

Apres-ski in Oberlech

St. Christoph

Looking towards Trittkopf in Zürs

Europeans in general seem to enjoy skiing on specific routes or circuits, and we encountered multiple ones at the three ski regions we visited. The main one at Lech-Zürs is the Weisse Ring (a 22-km circle route that goes clockwise from the town square in Lech, into Zürs, down a long trail to Zug, and up what had to be the world’s longest double chairlift back to Lech. There is also a “Run of Fame” that runs end-to-end from Warth to St. Anton, with a 60,000 foot vertical drop over 65km of slopes. And once you get to the other end, you have no hope of getting back before the lifts close — it would take pretty much an entire day of hard skiing to complete the one-way effort. We did not try this one.

Skiing the “White Ring”

Lech at dusk

A secret ski run in Zürs

Some additional thoughts on Austria:

• Every country in Europe travels to Austria to ski; we’ve heard the usual languages (Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Norwegian — or maybe it was Swedish, it’s hard to tell) plus some unusual ones, for us at least (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Arabic).
• The level of skiing in Austria caught us off guard. Most Austrians are really, really good skiers; even grandma carries an avalanche kit for skiing off-piste. I guess we shouldn’t be too surprised, the entire western half of the country is in the Alps. Plus, they invented modern skiing.
• The locals are very friendly and welcoming – the German language even has a single word (naturally) for “the state or feeling of warmth, friendliness, and good cheer” that’s prevalent in the Austrian Alps. Repeat after me: Gemütlichkeit.
• As a very good friend told us before we flew over, in Austria, actions are either forbidden, or they’re obligatory.
• Bacon, or at least their version of it (thinly sliced, often cured instead of cooked, and called “Speck” in German), is a major staple of the Austrian diet; there are actually stores called “Speckeria”, which basically translates as “bacon emporium”. Imagine an entire store devoted completely to bacon; this is the world in which I wish to live.
• We tried the local varieties, but the best wines in Austria come from Bordeaux (France).
• Speaking of France, there IS compelling evidence that Austria invented the croissant.
• I know it’s shocking to point out, but Austrians love efficiency. Restaurant visits are based on your desired timing, not the waiters’.
• The drinking age for beer and wine is 16; for liquor, 18. Austrians have a much more civilized outlook on the subject than Americans.
• The mountain cheeses of Austria are delicious and varied, although we have not seen anything approaching that most magnificent of all cheeses, Epoisses.
• I need to emphasize again that Austrians have entire stores devoted to bacon.

A bacon store

That’s a cheese-stuffed hot-dog, wrapped in bacon

Austria claims to have invented the croissant

We stayed in a tiny little room in a 6-room inn about a 10-minute walk from the center of town, Chalet Verwall (pronounced something close to “Fair-vahl”). How tiny was it? The kitchen was in the bedroom. However, it was pretty far up the luxury scale compared to our normal accommodations, but Lech is that kind of place. C’est la vie (or I guess in this case, “Es ist Leben”). The manager and his wife (Mark and Melanie) were a real treat, and since the rest of the chalet was mostly empty during our two-week visit, we became friends. Mark is quite the chef, and several mornings he baked us fresh bread for breakfast. They even invited us for a home-cooked meal our final night.

Our room, with Mark’s fresh bread and squeezed orange juice

A final highlight from our trip is that a friend from Beaver Creek introduced us to the managing director of the tram and cable-car company in Lech. His job title in German is something like “Oberlech Bergbahn Meister”, which is possibly the world’s coolest job title. He invited us to join him and a group of semi-VIP visitors from Colorado (of all places), so we spent a full day getting a proper local’s tour of the entire St Anton-am-Arlberg interconnected ski areas.

On the VIP tour with Christoph (in the red and black, center)

After Austria it was back on the train to head to our next stop, Val Gardena in the Italian Dolomites (with a one-night stop in Innsbruck to load up on bacon before leaving the country). Hopefully there are no border guards, because I wouldn’t be surprised if taking bacon out of Austria is forbidden. Or perhaps, if I’m lucky, it’s obligatory.

The storm clears

Above the morning fog

Old-town Innsbruck

Above St. Anton looking east

Celebrating Trump’s first year in office

Beware of avalanches, indeed

Early evening in Lech

One of many slope-side restaurants

Dusk falls over Lech

Heather sledding in Oberlech

A slopeside restaurant in St Anton

Sunset in Lech

A full moon rises over the Alps

Innsbruck

October 8-15, 2017 – French Riviera. Now that our Dijon friends have moved to the Mediterranean coast, we have very few excuses for not visiting the Cote d’Azur. So once we got Après Ski winterized and put to bed in Auxerre (Burgundy), we pointed our rental car south, paid about $50 in tolls, and arrived in La Londe-les-Maures, roughly halfway between Toulon and St. Tropez.

Our final morning in Auxerre

The three main highlights of our trip through coastal Provence were seeing our friends, visiting les Gorges du Verdon, and transiting the Millau Viaduct on our way back to Paris. Our friends Marianne and Jean-Pierre now run a small B&B out of their house in the coastal town of La Londe. Since it was outside of tourist season, we had our friends mostly to ourselves.

Me, Heather, Marianne, and Jean-Pierre

We took day trips to Port Grimaud and St Tropez, and we spent a day exploring the coast on our own. St Tropez, of course, is the vacation spot made famous by Brigitte Bardot and Elton John, among other 1970’s celebrities who keep second homes there. The town is also a famous yachting center, so the central areas are very touristy, but wander just a couple blocks off the main drag and you find quiet courtyards and narrow back streets, set in the perfect climate of the French Med coast.

With the Brigitte Bardot statue

Back streets of St Tropez

St. Tropez waterfront

The ruined castle at Grimaud

We fell in love with Port Grimaud, a boater’s paradise where every appartment, villa, and townhome has its own boat dock on a protected canal network (kind of like Marina del Ray outside of Los Angeles, but without all the Californians). Our first day was a short visit with our friends, but we went back a second day and rented an electric boat so we could tour the neighborhood properly, by water.

Port Grimaud seen from the church tower

Our friends’ new hometown of La Londe has a local winery, Chateau Maravenne, which makes some spectacular white wines. They could easily hold their own against the famous Burgundy whites, but at a fraction of the cost. So we helped support the local wine-making economy and filled the last few spots in the 18-bottle allotment we planned to bring home.

Shades of St Barths; a mini-moke in St Tropez

Port Grimaud

An evening walk on the beach

From La Londe we headed north, into the foothills of the Alps. There, les Gorges du Verdon were carved (and I guess are currently still being carved) by snowmelt from some of the famous alpine ski areas. The water is a milky turquoise color, and the views from the cliffside roads are quite something. We spent two nights in the area so we would have time to hike and rent a canoe to explore the surroundings.

The central gorge

Les Gorges du Verdon

Western end of the gorge

Canoeing through the gorge

After Verdon it was time to work our way back towards Paris. We had one final mission to accomplish, a visit to the Millau Viaduct. The bridge, when built in 2004, was the tallest in the world, and is a unique engineering solution to the problem of very tall, long-span bridges. The bridge deck is a hollow steel box, and was assembled piece-by-piece on solid ground. As each approximately 50-foot section was welded to the main deck, a series of computer-controlled hydraulic wedges “walked” the deck horizontally out over the valley and onto the seven poured-concrete pylons (plus additional temporary scaffold pylons that were removed after the cable stays were installed). The thing is truly an engineering marvel. You can read all about it at Wikipedia.

The Millau Viaduct at dusk

Engineering and art come together

The enormous Millau Viaduct in the late afternoon

That pretty much wraps up our summer in France, 2017 edition. Our next big adventure is going to be 6 weeks of skiing in Europe in early 2018. Hopefully I won’t be quite as late writing about that trip as I was with France. But don’t count on it.

Moustiers-Sainte-Marie

Near the Lac du Verdon

The seaside resort town of Le Lavandou

At the gorge looking south

Lac du Verdon

A partial cross-section of the Millau bridge deck

A bridge over the upper Gorge du Verdon

Our canoe trip in the Verdon Gorge

September 13 – October 7, 2017 – Paris to Auxerre. In parallel with all the tech museums, we found time to socialize at the port, take lots of walks around Paris, and visit St Denis Cathedral. St Denis is famous for having most of the kings of France buried in its choir (your “A”-listers) or down in the crypt (the rest). The list runs almost uninterrupted from Clovis I (in the early 6th century) to Louis XVIII (1824).

Interestingly, the stone statues that decorate the sarcophagi bear no resemblance at all to the actual kings and queens whom they represent. Because it was not a practice to paint likenesses until the 15th or so century, no one actually knew what the early monarchs looked like, certainly not the artist called in to sculpt the effigy. Thus, the carving of “Louis the Fat” looks almost exactly like that of “Pepin the Short”.

Some of the many sarcophagi at St Denis

St Denis city hall

Overflow “dead VIP storage” in the St Denis crypt

One other first-time Paris activity for us was visiting the Cligancourt flea market. This is the Mount Rushmore of flea markets; covering about 18 acres, with over 3,000 vendors, the Marché aus Puces is considered the largest flea market in the world. It is ludicrously big, and you can buy almost anything there. We found an entire shop devoted to lapel pins. Another shop was filled with vintage pinball machines, and yet another was all antique nautical stuff.

Vintage pinball machines for sale

Notre Dame

Pont Alexandre III

On our last full day we helped a friend move her 45-ton barge ten hours down-river to her winter parking place, then spent the night onboard and took the RER (suburban train system) back to Paris. Our cruise back to Burgundy for our winter parking went without incident, and ended the summer with only 74 more hours on the engine. In a normal cruising season, we spend twice as much time moving the boat, but this year’s combination of a short time in country plus spending three weeks parked in Paris means we’ll need to do some extra cruising next year to make up for lost ground.

Our friend’s barge in Cergy

Stained glass in St Denis

Sacre Coeur

Our home for 3 weeks, the Port de Plaisance de Paris

Once we had the boat put away in Auxerre, we rented a car and did some touring to visit friends and wineries (not necessarily in that order). On the “friends” front, we drove to southern Burgundy and visited our friends Lynn and Ron, who live most of the year in France, but who recently came over to the dark side and bought a powerboat that they use in the winter, cruising the south-east USA. We also hiked to La Roche de Solutré, an escarpment that hangs over the wine-growing area of Pouilly-Fuissé.

La Roche de Salutré

Grapes at the Chateau de Rully

At the top of the hike

Wine-wise, we visited several small Burgundy producers, but the standout, by far, was Domaine d’Ardhuy, which owns 42 separate plots all around the Côte d’Or. The taste of their various wines ranges from outstanding to exquisite, and, incredibly, they let us taste a Corton-Charlemagne Grand Cru (pe. They have plots in some of the most famous names in wine, including the aforementioned Corton-Charlemagne, plus Clos de Vougeot, Puligny-Montrachet, Pommard, Vosne Romanée, and Gevrey-Chambertin. We of course bought some (of the less costly but still amazing Meursault) to bring home to our special stash, to the dismay of our wallets.

Grapes in Fixin

Tasting at Domaine d’Ardhuy

Vines near Beaune

Autumn vines in Fixin, northern Côte d’Or

A final stop on our way back to Auxerre was to visit the Château de Savigny-lès-Beaune. If you click this link you’ll see why this is no ordinary, “I’ve seen 30 French chateaux before” kind if place: (https://goo.gl/maps/w8YfqaaVhHQ2). It should come up in satellite view, and looking south from the chateau itself, in the top-center of the image, you’ll see what I mean.

The owner is a collector, about whom serious collectors say, “wow, he has quite a collection.” Sure, he has the standard warehouse full of race cars, motorcycles, even a nice collection of fire engines, plus an entire floor of the chateau devoted to model cars. But the real attraction is his 98 (!) fighter planes (mostly jets, plus a few helicopters) from around the world. He has an almost complete collection of Soviet MIG aircraft, plus every variant of the French Mirage fighter, plus Italian, German, and American planes. In the courtyard in front of the main door, pride-of-place (so to speak), he has an American F-16, a Mirage III, and an F-104 Starfighter.

Fire engine collection at Savigny-les-Beaune

Soviet Sukhoi SU-20 fighter jet

Acres of fighter planes amid the vines

Even if you have no interest in military aircraft, you still need to see, in person, his acres of relatively modern fighter aircraft, in among the vineyards of Savigny. It makes for quite a strange combination.

Part of the Mirage collection

Next up, our final week in France, where we visit our friends Marianne and Jean-Pierre, formerly of Dijon, who now live on the Med coast not far from St. Tropez.

Paris Metro sign, V1

Paris Metro sign, V2

Paris Metro sign, V3

Visiting our friends Guillaume and Marine in Paris

Cupola of the Grand Palais

Paris city hall

Eglise de Notre Dame

Chapelle St Juline-de-Vauguillain

“Après Ski” moored in Montereau-faut-Yonne

The entrance to Chateau Sauvigny

Rainbow (and lots of starlings) in Auxerre

A private chateau north of Cluny