Hiking and Walking in France
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…
Why yearn for faraway countries when so much beauty is close at hand? I would love to say that we went to explore the Parc du Cap Martin on the French Riviera inspired by these famous words of Goethe, but the truth is far more prosaic: a friend had invited us for a drink in…
Last week, we discovered that the “Cézanne Walk” in the artist’s home town of Aix-en-Provence is not the perfect route to finding out more about his paintings. We shall be making up for that today, venturing a little out of town for a “pilgrimage of artistic discovery” to a place which is, more than anything…
For many years, Aix-en-Provence had cornered the market for Picturesque Market Towns In Southern France. Easy-to-reach (just over an hour by train from Marseille) and pretty-to-look-at, it ticks all the important boxes for visitors. If you came from Northern Europe or North America and wanted to see a Typical Town In Provence, old men playing…
On any hiking holiday in the Loire Valley, you will, sooner or later, pass through one of the two largest towns in the area, Angers and Tours. You may also find yourself having a couple of hours to kill. Today, we will give you suggestions of how to do this. Easy Hikes on River Promenades…
This week’s walk is, at first glance, a carbon copy of last week’s: we take a walk along the Loire, … … see a beautiful castle … … and visit a historical little town that was built in its shadow. What’s more: the centrepiece of the walk is another river island in between the train…
Hiking and cycling make good bedfellows. There are only a few areas where you see one and not the other – even in high altitudes on rugged terrain where mountain bikers have become ever more prominent over the past decade. One exception is the Valley of the Loire in central France. This valley is famous…