A Rainy Day in San Remo Every trip to southeastern France should include at least a brief hop across the border to Italy. Ventimiglia, the easternmost stop on the half-hourly train service that connects all the famous Cote d’Azur resort towns from Cannes to Monaco and beyond, is the obvious choice, but if you can,…
Hiking in the South of France Eze it may be, but easy it certainly ain’t. Not for a certain Eze hiker In fact, the trail from Eze-sur-mer, the small town around Eze railway station between Nice and Monaco on the French Riviera, to “Eze village” up in the hills is just one steep stairway, up…
Easy hiking in the South of France Roquebrune I might as well admit it: walking – or hiking – is not always and under all circumstances the best key for unlocking unfamiliar destinations. You can, for example, get a good first impression of the French Riviera just by taking the eastbound local train from Cannes:…
Unsmiling French Gardens Foreigners in France – and that includes expats – display a surprisingly wide range of opinions about their host country. For every Francophobe who detests everything the country stands for, there is a Francophile for whom France can do no wrong, and there are, of course, hundreds of different shades of opinion…
Where to Go in Germany This is a postscript to the Wewelsburg walk from earlier in the year. Remember this walk we did through the charming landscape of the Alme valley near the west German city of Paderborn, where we discovered one of the Holy Shrines of the pagan death cult otherwise known as National Socialism?…
Day Trip from Paris Today, we will finish our walk around Mont Valerien outside Paris with the best of the tour’s three highlights. A Visit to an American War Cemetery Just before you return to the street that will lead you back down on your way to the RER station of Mont Valerien-Suresnes, you will…
Walks near Paris We Went Climbing Mont Valerien All right, Mont Valerien may not be much of a mountain, but one cannot dispute that, semantically, it belongs to the same family as Mont Blanc (whereas the Butte Montmartre and the Butte de Belleville in Paris are mere “hills”). And it is, with an altitude of 162 metres…
The Right Hiking Waterproof Outdoor Jacket For years, I had been priding myself on owning the cheapest of what I believed was a waterproof outdoor jacket in town. It had cost me 10 bucks and came from a supermarket chain that normally sells discount groceries and only extends its range of products temporarily when it…
Hiking Holidays in France Neglected but Pretty French Provincial Backwater France is one of the most visited countries in the world, but there are many French regions that certainly do not feel that way. The truth is that the flow of visitors to France is very unevenly distributed – like the rain in Spain, say,…
Easy Hiking in France Marais de Bourges The Marais de Bourges is a unique landscape: 135 hectares of marshland, criss-crossed by a dense network of footpaths, and all that in spitting distance to the centre of one of France’s oldest cities. We had been eager to explore this area for quite some time and were…