Over the river and through the woods...

Saturday we went out for a family hike when Alma woke up from her afternoon nap. The great thing about where we live is that as soon as she wakes up we can leave our house at and be at a trail-head 12 minutes later.

..."trail includes difficult passages..."

Fortunately Alma is stil very content to ride on my back, and the other kids are really great about hiking.  But really - what kid wouldn't like a trail that just goes straight through multiple mountain streams and waterfalls?

The hike is about 3.5km with about 500m of elevation gain - so there's a fairly long stretch that has a fairly significant amount of up.  But we have wised-up and carry more snacks now - and hold them out as blackmail ransom positive rewards for when we reach our destination

Grenoble in the valley below

And the waterfall at the end is a pretty good reward in itself.  When we got to it- Micah paused - then closed his eyes and with outstretched arms said "It was so beautiful I just had to see if it was a dream or not."  Seems reasonable to me.

not sure where he's going...but I'm sure it's safe

It only took about 3 hours for the whole hike, so we were home in time for supper.  Well - home in time for summer-schedule supper just after 8:00 - but still...

le tour

While my sister Marie and her family were here we got a chance to go see Le Tour de France again.  

It did not dissapiont.  

Let's face it - our kids are really in it for the 

caravane publicitaire - an 80 year old tradition where the sponsors of the race have a 20km long parade made up of their  160 vehicles.  

Run at the Truck and catch candy kids...I mean...Safety First, candy second.

It is actually mind-blowing that this parade leads the tour around France on it's 3 497km treck. 

 It's not hard to see how it's possible that they distribute some 16 million tinkety-gifty-things.  

We probably only came home with 10% of that between us.  Unfortunately Alma had come down with a fever, so Susan stayed home with her

The interesting thing for us was that last year the tour came right through our town - so we just walked - but also we were in the middle of the days course. This year we were in one of the bigger towns that the tour went through that day - so there was actually quite a bit of stuff set up there to see and do, and eat.

There were a whole row of tents where they were giving out samples of local cheese, sausage, bread etc- and my kids are becoming quite French and really love local cheese, and they are really quite Watts so they love anything that's free - so it was a pretty good set up for us.

So we wandered around and after we had done everything - and eaten all we could - we walked the full half-block back to our place on the race course.

Where we were on that day's course was sort of at the bottom of a long hill - so although we were on a narrow road that had railings on both sides - the peloton flew through at a pretty good clip.  Not too fast - as there was a pretty tight turn just 50m or so past us - but fast enough that one of the team cars could take a major limb off a child  (in fact the wind from the riders going past sucked Kristine's hat right off her head). That also meant that the entire thing was over in what seemed like 90 seconds.  Good thing the caravane lasted 40 minutes.

Afterwords - since we were in Voiron anyway - we went to the Chartreuse distillery

Because what kid doesn't like going back to the aging caves of the worlds only naturally green liquor that is made from a secret recipe of 130 plants that is only known by two monks?  That's right - no kid doesn't like that.

Girls day out

Susan and Matea went out this afternoon...

on their way out.

 ... for Matea to get her hair cut (I believe her first real cut since we moved to this country in August 2010!)

...and after

They grabbed some treats from the boulangerie next to the hair-dresser - then went over to eat by a chateaux.  Everything was going so well until 

- the van decided to not start! 

 So they sat in the 34* heat until ....dum du daaa....BOYS TO THE RESCUE. Jonah, Micah and I came (with Alma for good measure)  We tried jumpstarting it - but it was just not firing. It was acting like it wasn't getting any fuel.  Then Susan pointed out - "could it have to do with the fact that the tail pipe is right against  the hill back here" 
 So much for boys to the rescue.  
Yup - that was it. 

Wiener

A few weeks ago I got to go to Vienna to conduct some research for my second year PhD paper.  

For my paper I am investigating what allows resource-constrained individuals to be able to overcome their constraints and create successful innovations.  The field that I'm looking at is the coffee-growers who supply the specialty coffee world.  Most coffe in the world is sold as a strict commodity, with farmers just producing as many kilos as they can, not caring about the quality, and most buyers giving those farmers as little as they can get away with. However there is some that is sold basically the same way that fine wine is: the utmost care and attention, influence of terroir, buyers travelling the globe to find the best crop, the grower is treated as a valued  partner instead of a cog in the wheel of some global commodity chain.  So to find people to interview I traveled to Vienna during the World Barista Championships.  What a strange thing that is.

You have no idea what a big deal this is until you are there. These are people who train for months to serve their 3 different drinks as 7 judges rate their every move.  There is really no way to describe it.

The great thing is that coffee growers, buyers, national coffee boards, micro-roasters, and exporters were there and I got to talk to people from: Uganda, Columbia, Honduras, Ethiopia, Norway, Canada, Brazil, Yemen, India, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panama and where ever else I forgot.

And - as you may presume, the average person who attends a competitive coffee serving competition....is not your average person.  You would be easily forgiven if you were to have confused the event for some kind of Global Hipster Gathering.  Every time you turn around: waxed-moustache, full-beard, ironic-tee-shirt, skinny jeans, yellow socks, pink Toms, hemp messenger bag  - and that was just one guy. I'm sure they were all a bit devastated they couldn't bring all their retro-cameras and cruising bikes with them.

 un. 

believable.

The other very surreal thing about the trip is that I met up with friends from Edmonton while there.  The Canadian National champion is from Transcend Coffee, so quite a few of their crew was there - so I got to see old friends. The weirdest was spending time with James - as he's someone that I pretty much saw a few times a week all the years that we've ever lived in Edmonton - and then we moved almost two years ago and I haven't seen him since. 

Then he popped in here for a visit on his way to Vienna, then two days later I met up with him there - and we spent some time hanging out, exploring Vienna - as if it were normal.   

Vienna is a pretty cool city - lots of interesting things to see - also a lot of strange things:

14 feet along the Cinque Terre

Since the idea of the Cinque Terre holiday is fundamentally about hiking between the villages, that is exactly what we spent a fair amount of our time doing.  So there were 7 of us walking along the trails from age 5 to {redacted} plus Alma on my back.  

The first day we drove to Riomagiore and did the easy walk along the via del amore to Manarola. Twice we we drove down into La Spezia (a real city with grocery stores) and took the train to  Monterosso al Mare, once we stayed there and some played at the beach while others strolled through town. We hiked the 'officially-closed-but-you-can-still-use-it-just-step-over-the-equipment-we-flew-in" trail from Vernazza to Corniglia.  Basically, we used boats, trains, cars to get to our starting point - and then back home.

The views that you get are amazing.  They are the kind of views that dont' even seem real. We found ourselves saying on several occasions that it seemed like it was fake, or that we were on a movie set.

funny - it seemed like such a good idea

I can't explain how glad we were to find this.

A display showing some of the destruction of the flood last year in Vernazza

eating pizza in a shady 'side street'

coming down some of the stone steps along the vineyard terraces