Posts marked with the tag “France”
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Road Trip 2010 – Switzerland to Belgium
Wednesday, 23rd June 2010 • Travel • No comments
The first leg of this year’s summer holiday takes us from home in Switzerland through France, Luxembourg and Belgium.
Lac Léman at Montreux
Sunday, 6th June 2010 • Landscape photography • 2 comments
A panoramic view of Lac Léman from the top floor of the Grand Hotel Suisse Majestic in Montreux.
Get Shorty
Thursday, 22nd April 2010 • Life, Travel • 1 comment
A gallery of images from my journey to the U.K. and back, to collect Jo in 2006 and bring her back to live with me in Switzerland.
Notes from a flight home
Tuesday, 5th January 2010 • From the Road, Travel, Writing • No comments
Short observational notes taken on a flight between Edinburgh and Geneva.
Don’t ride the rails drunk, kids
Tuesday, 1st December 2009 • Travel • 1 comment
I woke a sleeping drunk last night, when the train to Interlaken terminated in Spiez due to the onward line being blocked.
He looked at me blurrily and asked whether he needed to catch the onward replacement bus service to get to Grenoble. (Which is in France.)
In other words, he’d staggered onto the wrong train from Bern, fallen asleep while the train was being prepared for a departure delayed by 30 minutes, then travelled half an hour in the wrong direction.
Don’t ride the rails drunk, kids.
Dieppe in winter
Monday, 2nd March 2009 • Photography, Travel • No comments
It seems that even back in the 1990s, I still knew a thing or two about timing when it came to "street" photography. On arrival in Normandy during a trip to visit a French camera club for the weekend with friends from Yateley Camera Club, this was the scene which greeted us when we pulled up in the beach-side car park. The photo is a scanned 35mm negative, retouched to remove scratches but otherwise largely unchanged.
Wedding trip part 2: Reims to the Channel Tunnel
Thursday, 31st July 2008 • Travel • No comments
After a good night’s sleep in Reims, we headed onward towards our appointment with the cross-Channel tunnel at a rate of knots, passing through the first toll booth of the day as we headed on through northern France towards Calais. We made pretty good time as the roads were exceptionally clear – by our experience, they usually are in northern France – and stopped off near Laon for the first fuel stop of the journey. This part of France is quite peculiar: flat and with few distinguishing points of interest, peppered with towns which seem to show a certain level of decline. Pulling off the Autoroute des Anglais (“Motorway of the English”, according to Google Maps) to find fuel, we ended up finding a filling station and a supremely dull Buffalo Grill restaurant to photograph as evidence of the general feeling of bleakness of this part of France.
Once back on the road again, we were entertained in part by trying to spot hunters in the massive fields, mere speck
Wedding trip, day one – Switzerland to Reims
Thursday, 24th July 2008 • Travel • No comments
I love travelling back and forth between Britain and Switzerland. Although it’s a long way, the journey is made pretty easy by the fact that most of the long haul is through France, where undulating countryside and unfamiliar landscape provides a level of interest and flat, straight, empty motorways make a journey with cruise control hardly stressful at all. Having tried a couple of routes now, I’ve found that the best and quickest (though perhaps not the least expensive, due to the toll booths) is to leave Switzerland at Mulhouse, near Basel, to head north through Germany to Strasbourg. From there, turn off and follow the signs for Metz and Paris, heading along the A4 through the Alsace region through north eastern France. Stay on this road until you reach the Champagne region, where you turn onto the A26 near Châlons-en-Champagne and head for the city of Reims.
We’d chosen Reims as a first night stopping place, as it’s about halfway through the journey to southern England and the city offers a r
Haute Koenigsbourg, France
Wednesday, 24th October 2007 • Individual photographs, Landscape photography, Travel • No comments
This idyllic landscape was our first proper stop of our long journey up to Scotland. We pulled off the motorway after spotting the castle on the hill and banked vineyards, glowing in the autumn sunshine. After winding our way through a small village amidst the vines, we found a spot at which to park and walked along a small lane before finding this view, above another wine-making village with a perfect view over the surrounding countryside. From here, we followed the ill advice of the satellite navigation device and spent more than an hour winding back and forth through the Vosges mountains along small, hilly roads, before finally getting back onto the main motorway and heading towards Reims. A lesson learned: don’t rely entirely on satellite navigation, when a definite, quicker route is more obvious.
Au musée du Louvre
Sunday, 20th August 2006 • Individual photographs • No comments
This is one of many photographs I’ve recently re-discovered, whilst scanning a massive number of negatives stretching from the early 1970s to the present day. The earliest are by my father, but the more recent ones are of my own making, between school days in 1989 and the present day. This one, taken on a rainy trip to Paris in 1997, is one of my favourite images from my days pre-digital, which I can finally see in all it’s geometric glory.