Hiking and Walking in France
I do not think that too many people will argue with me if I say that Marseille is not the most charming town in Latin Europe. Nor is it the most “easy-on-the-eye”. One reason for the city’s relative unpopularity is that it rarely manages to convey a sense of place. Marseille has neither the leafy…
The showcase gardens of the Riviera fall into two categories: for drama and excitement, you can visit gardens like the Giardini Hanbury near Ventimiglia or Menton’s Val Rahmeh, which were conceived for maximum effect on the grandest of theatrical scales. But on the local tourist board’s shortlist of famous Jardins de la Cote d’Azur, you…
Long urban and country walks are great but they do take up a lot of time: time to organize and to prepare, time to travel, time to do the actual walking. Such walks can easily become projects around which you have to structure not only the day itself but your entire weekend break, squeezing other…
If you travel a lot in Europe, there is a good chance that you will, sooner or later, pass through EuroAirport. This airport – which is located near prime hiking areas such as Lake Constance and the Black Forest and used a lot by low-cost airlines including Wizz and Easyjet – is the only airport…
Bordeaux, the unofficial wine capital of the world, may have given its name to the most famous appellation in the world, but on the vinicultural map of the region, its territory is represented by a lone blank spot: Bordeaux is virtually the only place within the Gironde département where no commercial vineyards operate, and it…
Bordeaux in the sunny southwest of France is the unofficial wine capital of the world. The label of “Bordeaux”, however, under which the locally produced wines are distributed across the world and which has earned the city its fame, only serves to indicate the name of the place where these wines have been stored, blended…
Lou Camin Nissart is the first of its kind in France: a Grande Randonnée, a top-category hiking trail, that goes around a town in a loop, similar to what the périphérique ring road does in Paris, only for hikers. And with far more pretty views, since the town in question is Nice, the scenic capital…
Having familiarised ourselves with the style and the atmosphere of the bourgeois 8th arrondissement of Paris (the neighbourhood around the Champs Elysees), we are now ready to explore the other quartier that plays a key role in Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time: the Faubourg St Germain, the part of Paris where, in the…
Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time is a big book in every sense of the phrase. In 7 volumes and a total of more than 1.2 million words, it deals with a lot of large topics: memory, social and political upheaval, love and death. On top of that, it features a large cast of…
When you visit a city for the first time and are not quite sure what you want to see, it is always a good idea to start with the unusual, the distinctive and – if possible – the unique. Our last post about Lyon, for example, concentrated on the Traboules (underground passages between buildings) and…
