Road trip to Ombleze

Chloe had found a new Gite just past the Gorges d'Ombleze which we were supposed to have gone to in May.  After a few cancellations and moves, we were finally able to go this weekend, and with mom!  Based on the price and remoteness, I was a little worried about what it would be like, but was very pleasantly surprised.  It was a very well refurbished farmhouse, with lovely furniture and cedar panelling everywhere (even in the bathroom!).  The kitchen was well equipped as well.  Next to the gite was a big field with knee high grass and a path carved through it to a small creek.

Glandon

I rode Glandon from the Maurienne with Martin -- my legs felt terrible and I was dropped, but what a wonderful alpine paradise it is up there.  1500 meters of climbing is a lot when you are not feeling fit, however.

Dinner at Francks!

Oh how I miss BBQ.  It's so strange and sad that we aren't allowed to grill on our little patio!


And as usual more fantastic desserts from Franck

Pizza night

with the guys.  Franck, who is known for his exceptional dessert making skill, made probably his best dessert ever, and one of my all time favorites.  I took the opportunity for a little Phantom footage, even if I had meant to shoot stills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGo7zMcFGNY

Touvet

Today mom and I went to the chateau du Touvet, in the Gresivaudan, to the East of Grenoble.  After a very short drive, we followed the tree lined entry, parked and bought a ticket.  I soon found myself in a conversation with the woman at the ticket booth about where we were from, and the usual questions about what we were doing there.  It turned out that she was from St. Egreve, and did I know that there was a chateau in St. Egreve, too?  It turned out that the current owner of the chateau du Touvet (their family has been in charge for the last 500 years) used to own the chateau in which we live, and had broken it up into apartments and sold it.  We all laughed together about the coincidence before the bell for the tour rang, and mom and I had to quickly shuffle off down the very long but impressive driveway.  The tour began with a description of how the castle used to guard against some hostile neighbors (The Savoyards), of which there were a couple in the tour with us, who took it in stride.  The docent told us that the gardens used to be even more majestic when they could afford ten gardeners instead of one.  Ah, la crise!

Once after we entered the castle, I immediately took a photo of the impressive entry, and was as usual told that photography was not permitted.  It seems that not even the smallest of public places has escaped this irritating anti-photography trend.


Next on the tour was the salon, where there were two big basins which were apparently used for rinsing your hands after eating utensil-less.  There was also a table on which the aristocrats would place their dead animals after the hunt.  The flooring in this room and all of the other rooms that we saw (only the ground floor, unfortunately) was spectacular.  Up next, the music room, where I was mostly fixated on the floor again, which was a mix of noyer (walnut), merisier (wild cherry) and Erable (maple).  Stunning.

I don't remember too many details about the rest of the tour, except that there were extremely wide chairs to accomodate the huge hooped dresses of some particular era.  At one point, the docent asked us what we thought the boudoir was for, and one wag replied "pour bouder!", which received some laughs.  After looking it up, I discovered that "bouder" is "to sulk".  So I learned some vocabulary!  We also saw a cool yew table which was made from yews felled from the St. Egreve chateau.  I actually noticed that there were some Yew trees on the grounds, and had started to make Alex a bow with some branches, until I read that every part of the tree except parts of the berry is extremely poisonous.

After the tour, mom and I wandered the gardens and grounds

Mom

Mom always amazes us with how quickly and easily she figures out local public transportation systems.  She is already at home going to and from the center on various buses and trams.  She's been exploring a bit and brought back a small selection of desserts today!

Tour, Frise

Took Keith and Mom on a tour of the synchrotron and to la Frise before dropping keith off on the train to  Paris

Presles and Pont en Royans with mom, Zoe and Keith

We did a little Vercors tour today by way of the col du mont Noir, then through Presles, to Pont-en-Royans and then back over the plateau and down to the valley again.  We stopped at a nice little cafe for drinks in Presles and had some outstanding ice creams in Pont-en-Royans.  We also stopped at the cheese co-op and bought some bleu de Sassenage as well as some Vercorais (not impressed).  It was a beautiful day, tje wildflowers were everywhere and I did not fly the phantom into a cliff.  What more could you ask for?

Chamchaude, with the quad

Keith and I walked up the Chamchaude today.  The sign at the bottom said 2:30 to the top, and we didn't realize that was round trip, so we were walking pretty fast (we got a late start).  One hour and fifteen minutes later we were at the top, in a big cloud bank freezing our asses off.  I did a quick flight, saw the wind buffet the quad enough to get scared and then put it down.  I did manage to get some cool shots lower on the mountain, even if it the thought of loosing the thing scared the hell out of me.  Strangely, some local birds took umbrage at this invasion of their airspace and began circling and dive bombing the phantom!

So, the bottom line is that this thing is a game changer for me.  Even if the quality of the camera is not that wonderful, the perspective is incredible.  It's a little like macro or wildlife shooting: I'm not convinced of how much artistic value they have, but it is SO fun.

School performance

We went to Zoe and Alex's end of the year school performance.  Apparently they practice quite hard for these things!  Chloe and I were satisfied that neither Zoe nor Alex had to be pulled screaming from the stage.

Keith here!

At long last Keith has come to visit

Quadcopter

So I've had a rough few weeks.  So rough that I didn't really even have a chance to celebrate my birthday (actually, I was on a plane) so wanted to have something cool and new to play with.   I've actually wanted an RC airplane since high school, but figured that it would be an endless frutrating stream of broken wings and props.  Enter the quadcopter:  a RC flying machine with a much more shallow learning curve.    I have been reading about RC drones for a while, and recently a company called DJI that sells the flight control "brains"used in many multi rotors copters released their own quadcopter which is called the Phantom.  Everyone seems to love it, even if there are a few things that they got wrong.  I did a little research and at least in my opinion, for a quad carrying a HD Hero, the Phantom is the best deal going.  The GoPro is not the best for stills, but excels at video.  I picked one up from a local shop on the other side of town (http://www.flashrc.com/, HIGHLY recommended) , started the thing charging, picked up the kids, asked who wanted to see daddy's new helicopter, and interpreted their YAAAAAAY YES ME I WANT TOs as an affirmative.  I had watched all the tutorial videos except the advanced guide multiple times and started off gently.  I did not, however notice the fact that when you get an imperfect GPS lock, the copter does not use GPS to correct its flight, so hands off the joysticks=copter continues to coast.  So, long story short, on the second flight a mild puff of wind starts the phantom going towards the forest.  Worse still, it gets turned around so all the directions controls are now flipped.  It lofted slowly over the fence and crash landed in an immense stand of bushes.  Nice.  I put the controller down, and with the kids in tow began bushwhacking in my shorts and sandals.  That's when I noticed that this was no ordinary stand of bushes, but chest high stinging nettles with some blackberry vines weaving through them for.  Zoe tried to follow me without my noticing and she was soon crying from a nettle sting, and my arms and legs were starting to throb.  I brought the kids back to the chateau, got on my Carhartts (the ones I used to use when I was chainsawing stuff) and headed back into the sea of pain.  After stomping down a large area, I eventually found the thing deep in a nettle.  So not the most auspicious of starts, but it could have been a wall, I suppose.

Since then (Monday) I have done at least six flights and am getting better and better but still have moments of terror when the copter gets turned around and the controls are shifted by 90, 180 or 270 degrees.  I have to say though that this thing is amazing.  It will climb, drop and glide as fast (ok, much faster) than I am comfortable with and gets around 12 minutes from a fully charged pack.

Tonight I showed it off to Franck and managed not to crash it or injure either one of us, despite the lack of GPS lock again and a bit of wind.




I can't wait to do flyovers of cols, cliffs etc.  This is going to be amazing.

An amazing book

I was combing through eBay looking for prints of some of my favorite local spots, when I found a beautiful print of La Berarde.  It was only $20 and I almost bought it immediately, but was so intrigued by it that I did a little research on it's provenance.  It turned out to be a litho by Thornton Oakley from 1927.  Unfortunately, it was a plate that had been sawed out of a book (Cloud Lands of France) by someone.  I think most people who like engravings know that many antique books get chopped up and sold individually by dealers.  Even large and very famous places like Graham Arader did it at one time.  It's called "Book Breaking", and I think it sucks.  Not as bad as breaking library books, but still pretty lame.  Anyway, the big argument that book breakers will make is that they make artwork that would be impossibly  expensive as a book accessible to  most people as individual plates.  i.e. very few people would be able to afford an atlas, but many people can afford to buy one print chopped out of an atlas.  I guess I can kind of buy it.  Anyway, as soon as I discovered that the Thornton Oakley print came from a book, I immediately decided to find and buy the entire book.  I was girding myself for an astronomical price, but within five minutes had found a first edition in very good condition for ten USD.  Thats right, a first edition book from 1927 with lithographically printed drawings for ten bucks.  I bought it immediately (and am thinking about trying to buy up more copies to keep them out of the hands of the book breakers).  A few weeks laster, I received it in the mail.  Let me cut to the chase: It is a revelation.  The drawings are beautiful.  The writing (by Amy Oakley, Thornton's wife) is fabulous  and contains much fascinating history of the region.  Last, but not least, I just fell in love with the story of a young American couple from Philadelphia arriving by boat and exploring some of our very favorite (and quite remote in 1924) places in the Alps.

Here are some terrible scans

Best car show ever!

a friend sent me a link to a video in which some dudes attach a rocket engine to a bike.  It was entertaining, but fortuitously at the end there was a link to a video on "How to turbo your car" .  Being a long time turbo enthusiast, I couldn't resist clicking on it and found a fantastic new (to me) car show.  Don't get me wrong:  I love Top Gear, but their "idiot car guy" schtick is starting to wear thin, even if Clarkson is still very entertaining.  Also, I am kind of getting tired of looking at "films", as they like to call their little video clips, of impossibly expensive hyper cars.  That's a big part of the appeal of this new show.  It's just a couple of very enthusiastic, hilarious and skilled Aussies who show people how to modify cars in various ways.  Their latest feature was a how-to guide for turboing a mazda Miata.  There's a guy that they call the Turbo Yoda, who welds them together a new exhaust manifold!  Anyway, I love the show, even if I will never do anything like that to our Honda.  Old dog, new tricks after all.  The show is called Mighty Car Mods.





Many more on their channel

http://www.youtube.com/user/mightycarmods?feature=watch

extra points for them being Australian, because Aussies are the best!

Mom here!

Teeth!

Zoe's second tooth came out today and thankfully did not end up getting ingested.  In France, it is a mouse, rather than a fairy that exchanges cash for teeth, but since Zoe is a bicultural girl, she managed to get visited by both the tooth fairy *and* the French mouse.  Happily there were no turf wars or other unpleasantness over the tooth and the tooth fairy and mouse came to an agreement on the distribution of teeth.

Poo

For the poo-averse (i.e. non parents), stop reading here.  Zoe's teeth have been getting loose, and we have all been excitedly waiting for the first of her baby teeth to fall out.  She of course already knows about the tooth fairy and indeed has already mentally spent the cash that she knows will show up.  Unfortunately, the loose tooth fell out while she was eating at some unknown time a day ago.  It was therefore with extreme disgust, but a strong sense of paternal duty that I instructed Zoe to poo into the baby toilet instead of the normal toilet and then got to work.  Twenty minutes later, after a process that I can only describe as like panning for gold, only with a slurry of poo instead of water and a tooth instead of gold, I was left with profound sense of failure, watering eyes, and no tooth.

Catching up

It's been a tumultuous few weeks, to put it mildly.  I have another week of business, and then I will hopefully be able to start catching up, and post some stuff retroactively.  In the interest of not getting too backed up, I think I will just start posting as usual and then fill in the past few weeks little by little.  The big news is that my dad died on the 13th of May.  I had flown in the previous night and so I was able to see him before he passed away.  We had a memorial service for him shortly afterwards.  He has been in my thoughts every day, but I have luckily been incredibly busy, so it has taken my mind off of things a bit.  I miss him a lot.