Summer break

During our last summer vacation we first headed to France to enjoy its renown culinary art...pretty much guaranteed to eat very well no matter where we end up to!

We spent a week around the region of Drôme, the department located in southeast of France.
Although its geography and climate is different from where we live, we only had to drive about 3.5hours to get there (ok this can vary depending on traffic condition mostly an issue in and around the bottleneck A7 autoroute du Soleil). This region is less touristic than Provence, so it does not have its disadvantages like the overly pricy restaurants and over-crowded places.. This department along with the ones nearby (e.g. Ardèche, Vaucluse) seems to have been better preserved from the wars destruction effect.

Just next to our house we rented, there was the village of Savasse, located north of Montélimar and on the east bank of the Rhone:



The house located on the south side of the hill offered the natural advantage of protecting us against the sometimes brutal northerly Mistral wind. Looking at all the vegetation found at the house or nearby, we would say that the climate is very Mediterranean-like.

Here are some of the plants we found at the house "Laurier-rose", Artichoke, "Figuier", "monnaie-du-pape"..

Also present throughout the region are the small perched and fortified villages typical of the middle-age period (built explicitly as a defensive position). During a ride with my bike, I actually stumbled into one of these villages: Rochemaure (an officially classified site), where we returned at night to visit and eat out :

We encountered quite a few other similar village during a getaway to the Gorges d'Ardèche (the french version of the Grand Canyon), there is one that attracted our interest just by its funny name “Bidon” (http://www.ardeche.guideweb.com/ville/bidon/), literally meaning fake or phony in french!

The Gorges itself are less spectacular than the Grand Canyon, but they are worth the trip. This is apparently shared by a great number of people when we consider the number of tourists seen camping and canoeing at the gorge. I now better understand the familiar complains of Europeans about the tourists invasions in France, and why someone could appreciate a country like Canada for its quietness or emptiness !

One destination that I've reserved only to myself was the Mont Ventoux located in the Vaucluse. Yes, I took the long ride up this mountain often called Géant de Provence. The riding difficulties are mostly caused by temperature (the first 10km are quite hot although protected by shade of the pinède -pine forest), the length of the ascent (1617 m over 21,8km from the small and beautiful village of Bédouin), and the constantly grade offering no break or pause getting even worse near the summit with the last 2-3km having the steepest gradient (over 10%).

Just too bad my mobile phone did not have enough battery to take picture of the beautiful 360degree view up there. In today's Internet era, you are never too far from being exposed to the web. There were people taking pictures to publish them on the Internet and offering the possibility to buy a full resolution image. These guys make a living off vanity of most cyclers...they'll surely get rich!! ...yes as this site is all about self-exposure (;-)), here you go with some snapshots:

as seen by the poor resolution of these advertised pics, I did not actually purchase these pictures..

Speaking of cycling, during my vacation I also cycled to Verbier with a friend that visited over. Verbier has a well-known classical festival.... however this time it conflicted with the 15^th stage of tour de France. It turned out to be the decisive stage where Cantador completely dominated during the 15km ascent (yes this is again a non-human performance, but nothing new for this sport always bringing its share of controversy).

I've never thought that the tour could be such a popular event... there were near 100,000 people all gathered in the Verbier ascent! Probably a good 25% were cyclers, so it was quite exciting after the race to ride among all pelotons scattered on the way down to Martigny. We also rode with the pros, as most of them quickly returned to their team camper located below!

Later on in our vacation, we visited Yvoir which is also very near our place. It is a small medieval village located just on the other side of the Leman, and that celebrated its 700^th year of history in 2006. coming from Switzerland, the easiest is to go by boat leaving Nyon and only lasting about half an hour.

Although the village is very nice-looking with all its flowers and old stones, the shopping industry completely took over. And this has become as expensive or even more than Switzerland.

Ok that's about it, a special thanks to all my family who shared these visits with us and also provided some of the pictures shown here.

Martin