Day: October 8, 2012

Friday evening and Saturday we visited Mark and Nathalie and their children Timothee, Emma and Diane.
The first dinner was Raclette

Leilani discovered the play area and yelled out, “Wow, playland” and spent most of the time there

Saturday, after a nice breakfast we went hiking.




We did not just find puffballs, but many other (and much tastier) mushrooms

But the ripe puffballs are good for stomping



Inkcaps we don’t eat. This one is too old, but we found many fresh and tender ones, but one can’t drink alcohol with it, so I don’t even know how they taste…







We got about twice as many after we picked all the mushrooms from the backyard too. In the end they made a great appetizer, scrambled with 6 eggs.

Mark, Tim, Andy and Leilani went to see the fort










Second dinner was fondue. That was my fault, but it was really good. I made up for being dairy free for 1/2 a year this weekend (but I did not gain back all the weight)

Friday we took the TGV to Grenoble. Just a little slower than flying, and just a little cheaper. However, having a restaurant car on the train makes it much more enjoyable than flying.

Farmland outside Paris:

Mountains near Grenoble:

Mountains in Grenoble:

In Grenoble, we took the tram…

…and walked around a little…

… and ate at Caffe Forte, where Andy and his writing team often had lunch while he worked at Sun in Grenoble

When we were here on a business trip long ago, we stayed at this little hotel (second building)

We visited Nadia and baby Emile (7 months):

When we picked up Aristide at preschool (at 4:30!), Andy saw the cool artsy cup display with the names of the children:

We went to a park so the kids could play, and Andy got some chocolate as a birthday gift for his 40th:

3 unknown kids, Aristide and Leilani

Leilani took a great photo

And she finally got to ride on the zip-line after not being able to understand the French kids:

When I was a kid I had this exact same Barbie, probably even the same clothes…


Belledonne mountains east of Grenoble:

The french I think don’t eat kale, but they noticed it’s beauty and plant it as an ornamental:

Near the train station:

Thursday we took the train to Versailles



I finally learned to use Gimp (instead of Photoshop in case I don’t have my own computer) and took a few people out of this image. The result was by far not as good as it would have been and it took an hour rather than 10 minutes, but it made me happy to learn something new. Gimp is a free program, and for that an do a lot. What worried me a bit was that I discovered a whole lot of cool new features, so I guess it’s time to upgrade my Photoshop to a newer version… (and spend less money doing so than it cost us to travel to France)

No photoshopping on this one, people went away by themselves

That’s looking out to the same area as the photo above

I put all the photos from the lower park together, even though we crossed it multiple times, once before going in the chateau, then for lunch in the park, and after lunch all the way down to Marie Antoinette’s farm, and late back up again.
The fountains were off, and they had removed all the flowers this exact day, some of them were still so beautiful, laying in big piles to die… I’ll spare you these photos, but there were still other interesting features:

The place where we had a reasonably priced and good lunch – crepes and salad – also had cats.


Sadly it was locked but at least we could photograph in

The little wild area was open from one side and forbidden from the other…


Leilani tricked the swans by throwing pebbles in the water, they all swam over to see

The park is so big, we rented bicycles and biked to the guesthouse, the Grand Trianon

They had an exhibition about the women at Versailles, and on a different day I would have been very impressed… or maybe it should have been seen before the chateau.

That (and a few other pieces not visible in this photo) was made of malachite, and impressed me even after seeing all the rest… and I’m proud of the photo too…

A park in the park…

We finished the day with a dinner with Sakura and Xavier and his parents, who Andy has known from childhood