Mont Saint Michel

Yeah I know my sabbatical posts are slow to come and kind of out of order, but I am so late that the order does not matter anymore anyway ;). During our trip in France we stopped in Paris for a couple of days then headed to the D-day beaches in Normandy, stopping on our way in Giverny at Monet's garden. We then spent a whole day visiting the Mont Saint Michel. And I happened to have developped that day's pictures tonight so You'llget a sample here ;).

This is a maze of romanic style architecture.


Yes you noticed, the weather is getting pretty bad, and still we went to take the next picture...

... and got soaked like never on the way back to the car. That was the most violent storm we all had been under, we were instantly soaked and the drops were beating us so hard it hurt. I'll keep posting pictures from the France part of the trip here.

Preparing for Halloween

Last weekend we went to the pumpkin patch, got lost in the Maize (corn maze) and brought back a 15 kilos and a 5 kilos pumpkins. It took us about 1 hour to get out, and we tried quite hard. The maze was really large :). You can see here the girls happy to finally exit.


Pumpkins everywhere


Tonight, while waiting for my carbonade flamande to cook I carved the small one, say hi to happy Jack !


More pictures here.

Sabbatical - Finland 1

Looking back at the whole sabbatical, the time we spent in Finland definitely left us some of the greatest memories. It was the beginning of the vacation and the time we spent in the wilderness was definitely a welcomed break from the daily routine.
As said in the previous post we started in Helsinki, the city ambiance was quite laid back and nice, but we were not overly impressed by what it had to offer. What impressed us though was the size of the ferries linking the city to Talinn.


We spent the next day on the island of Suomenlinna, a fortress guarding the entrance to the port of Helsinki. The fortress contains a small city, mostly occupied by old military blocks, defenses and a dry dock that was built by connecting 2 small islands. It's a nice place to have a relaxing walk looking at older architecture.


We originally had planned to stay for most of the vacations in the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) but we decided that it would be stupid to pass in Finland without seeing a bit of the Lakes area. On the way to the lakes we made a stop in the very cute little town of Porvoo.



We arrived in the lake district's through the capital: Savonlinna (Newcastle in Swedish) also known for its medieval castle that was guarding the border of the kingdom with Russia then.


The next morning we headed to the Linansaari national park with the intent to rent a canoe to explore the wilderness. They were out of canoes but convinced us easily that what we wanted was a 2-sitter kayak in which we could easily put all our camping gear and go for a multi-day expedition in the park. They provided us with a map with the list of islands where there was a camp spot. We originally wanted to go for 2 days only - we were kind of short on food and water for longer - but we decided we would go for 3 and would stop on the main island where there was a well to refill water and a cafe where hopefully we could munch. So yeah we left for 3 days with supplies for half of that, but it would have taken us half a day to get back to a supermarket and come back to the lake.

We headed "straight" towards the island where we intended to camp the first night which was about 10 miles away. Yes "straight" because it's actually pretty hard to actually go straight on a lake in a kayak, not get lost between the multitude of look-alike islands. Honestly, without the map + compass we would have had quite a tough time. We decided to stop on the first island that had a camp spot just to check how it looked like as it was our first experience with the Finnish national parks. We were blown away by the accommodations we found there. You could only set 3-4 tents maximum on that island but you had a small woden shed with pre-cut wood, an axe, a saw, dry toilets with a reserve a toilet paper, a fire pit with a grill, a kettle and a pan for cooking.

This comforted us quite a bit as we were a bit nervous heading out deep in the wilderness, far from everything with nothing else than what we had in our kayak. We made it to our camp where we were joined by a French guide with his 2 daughters. That evening, he was teaching them to fish and I proceeded to scale, gut and cook their fish on the fire. We were gratified by a wonderful sunset, and played cards (tarot) with them until midnight and it was probably the night we went to bed the latest of the entire trip :).

The next morning we hiked around the island for a few hours in order to refill our water supply and get some food. Despite the rationing we were already very low on supplies and we were getting quite hungry. It was with great pleasure that we made it to the little cafe on the other side of the island. We ordered pretty much one of each of their snacks including one with freshly smoked fish from the lake (she fired up the smoker at 9 am just for us). It tasted amazing ! We then went and tried to buy supply but were quite disappointed as they seem to only offer candy and chips. Almost only as I spotted on the top shelf a tin can with no sticker that had just "Moose" written on it with a sharpie. That moose can ended up being one of our favorites culinary memories of Finland (with the locks - smoked salmon - which was absolutely amazing, the best we ever ate, ever ever). So we bought that can of moose, convinced her to sell us some of the bread she had to make sandwiches and we were now ready to continue, not hungry anymore and quite happy.

We headed to another island, about 10 miles from the first one again and this time we were all alone at the camp even though a sailboat had anchored on the other side of our tiny island and a wild party seemed to be going on there. That night we bathed for a second day in the lake, had fire toasted moose sandwiches and slept like babies as paddling for hours is quite something on the upper body. The next day we headed back to the park entrance and decided we would try another national park instead of going to Estonia as it was really fun. That day was quite windy and we discovered how much easier it was to paddle on a flat lake instead of fighting with waves.
We drove north to Karelia, right at the border with Russia and I'll tell you more about it soon. In the mean time you can look at all the Finnish photo album here.

Sabbatical

I've been in the company for long enough to be elligible for a sabbatical vacation, that's an additional 8 weeks on top of the usual vacations. M successfully took unpaid vacation to come with me and we've been going around for over two weeks. You won't see any pictures for now and for a while but I'm going to try to keep our itinerary up to date here.
We flew to Helsinki, through Chicago and Frankfurt, it took us about 28 hours door to door. It was long enough that we pretty much didn't get any jetlag. We walked all around town enjoyed the quietness and slow living style and after 2 days we were departing for Porvoo, a cute little town a bit east of Helsinki. We spent the best part of the day windowshopping there, and enjoying the views on the old houses across the river. That was our first night of camping. That was pretty much it for classical tourism in Finland, we were going to spend most of the rest of the trip in the nature.
After camping in Savonlinna, the capital of the lake district, we headed ton Linansari, one of the large parks covering the lakes. There we rent a 2 sit kayak for 3 days, packed the camping gear into the kayak and headed for 3 days of island to island paddling and camping in the wilderness. That was also our first encounter with the Finnish national park accomodations. We were amazed at their quality. Sprinkeled all over their national parks are free campgrounds where you can find a dry toilet, a fire pit with gear to cook (including kettle and pan), dry wood, an axe to split it and usually amazing views. We were so enchanted by the trip around the lakes that we decided to go for another park instead of heading early for the baltic countries.
We drove to the northern part of Karelia, to the park of Ruuna, where we settled on an island in the middle of the river. That was probably the most scenic camp spot I've ever been at. We did short hikes in the park, gathered berries, did some rafting in the river's rapids and on the third day we headed farther north towards Lapland. We stopped one day for laundry in the lovely town of Kuhmo, the cultural capital of Karelia, where we visited a few local culture and history museum and learnt all about the Kalevala, the Finnish Epic stories and legends. From there we departed for the Oulanka national park to hike the little bear's trail. By then the weather had started to be quite cold, the Finnish were back at school and most places where empty.
Unfortunately the sun left us and we didn't get a sunny hike in Lapland. The hike was very pretty, we had a close encounter with a reindeer and a not so close one with a moose. We harvested mushrooms for the evening dinner, which we followed by one hour in the sauna, which helped gratly for the coming cold night.
We then drove to Rovaniemi, crossed the arctic circle, and did some shopping in "Santa's official home town". At least his post office is there, and we took advantage of it ;). We finished the day by a long visit to the arctic museum which gave us a lot of insight in the arctic ecosystem and the arctic populations cultures.
Next day was drive fest, we drove all the way down to helsinki in 10h30 to realize that I had forgotten my camera bag and passport at our last spot 250km north, where M courageously drove us back.
Yesterday we took the ferry to Talinn, and had quite a shock when we arrived at the camping. No more beautifull nature, cute little clean log toilets etc... Talinn's camping is a parking lot with a few smelly showers in a hangar nearby. That totally looked soviet style... Anyways, it rained all night and we decided a Hotel bed was in order.

See you

Anna and Danny's wedding

This weekend was the day for them, it started with a nice ceremony in Peninsula park right next to their home, driven by MC Allen and continued at the Bridgeport brewery downtown. We had a great time.

Walking down the aisle


Kissing


Married !!!

The rest of the ceremony pictures are here.

Blog Tweak

Just a quick note to say that I changed the way images are displayed once you click on them. I suggest you try to click on the next picture (once the page has been fully loaded). It should allow you to preview bigger images without having to navigate back and forth and is prettier than what I was doing before.

I took this series of pictures over the weekend to see how small were the things that I could photograph. The result is pretty interesting, the diagonal of the picture represent about 4mm in the real world. It was quite a pain to set the whole thing up (belows, reflex box, chimney visor, 35mm lens+ about 20cm extensions, tripod and a lot of patience).

Independence day

Yesterday for the 4th of July, Anna and Danny invited us at their house for a chicken roast party to celebrate the Independence day. As we arrived, I noticed Danny in a corner in front of THAT:

Yes he overdid himself and there was clearly some advanced engineering and thinking that had been going on. He had been patiently rotating the chicken by 90 degrees clockwise every 3 minutes precisely for the past 2 hours and a half and regularly measuring the temperature with a meat thermometer. I was clearly impressed and I was not the only one drooling nearby.

After another half an hour of slow roasting, we enjoyed some nice and juicy chicken with some Cincinnati BBQ sauce (it was really good and I'm not a fan of BBQ sauce usually).
We took our time, enjoying a not-so-sunny-afternoon chatting, tasting some more summer ales and then proceeded to play ladder toss:

M and I lost our game against a highly competitive team :). It felt very nice, we were playing on the front-yard right by the sidewalk, one neighbor stopped to play a game with us, passer-by were asking about the game, the kids next door were watching us.
As the night started to come, the fireworks started. I learned that they are kind of forbidden in Oregon, you can't buy fireworks that go any higher than a few feet, and overall they have to be pretty weak. I was getting ready to be disappointed when the 2 neighbors essentially started a competition that would last for the next 2 hours, playing at who's going to fire the biggest fireworks. It was amazing (and clearly illegal), some were launching up to probably 50m or higher in the sky and triggering multiple flower explosions, and it was going on and on, bigger and bigger. We all decided that next year we would all team up together, travel to Washington and buy some very large amount of big, nice and illegal firework and would participate to the neighborhood festivities by blowing up stuff, like everybody else. Yeah, nobody would really have believed fireworks were illegal in Oregon, and it was not just our 2 neighbors, it was the entire city that was firing up big stuff at each intersection :). Anyways, we had tons of fun ! More pics here.

NAOBF

Yesterday, after picking 6kg of raspberries in Sauvie Island, we headed to Overlook park in Portland for the North American Organic Beer Festival. It was conveniently located on the yellow MAX line which passes close to our place so we could just ride the tram there, we actually met our friends in the MAX as they had found parking only quite far away.
Like most beer festivals here, the first thing you're being asked before getting in is your ID, if you're over 21 you'll get a bright wristband. The next stop is to buy tokens and a cup if you intend to try the beers. It's 6$ for the cup and 1$ per token which gets you one sample to try (4 tokens get you a full glass). Once our tokens collected, we headed for the shade of a very large tree to study the beer list in order to chose what we wanted to try. The printed list that you get there has more details like a description of the flavors, the ingredients and the level of bitterness on the IBU scale.

Once you've figured out which one you want, you wander around and try to locate where the line for the brewery you're interested in is.

Once found, you wait hoping they don't run out :), or jump to the shortest line and try something random. Once at the counter you hand 1 or 4 tokens to the person that is pouring the beer of your choice, done. As you can see here, "no wristband, no beer"

Overall it was quite nice to hang with friends in a park, trying out new beers and looking at how happy everybody was, listening to the live bands and watching the kids play around even though I preferred the winter beers (our last beer fest was the winter one). Pictures of the happy participants here.
We even got free bread !

Patisserie course

As a wedding present, M got a pastry course at the Oregon culinary institute. She spent Sunday morning baking and baking more. As I had bought nice hood strawberries and raspberries we decided it was time to put her newly acquired skills to good use as well as our newly acquired tart pans.

And yes I had quite some fun playing with the macro lens, the tripod and the remote flash :).

Conference in Chandler, AZ

Last week I spent 2 days near Phoenix, Arizona for a conference. The hotel/resort was located in the middle of the desert so we would be isolated and work all together I suppose :). I found the location to be great and would actually have enjoyed spending more time there.

The hall was quite impressive

The outdoors were nice, a combination of desert, water and cacti, more pictures here. The good news is they didn't try to deport me as it seems to be in fashion over there lately.

Slow 3-days weekend

Saturday around 6 we received a text from Anna asking us if we were coming to a concert with them that night. I answered a "No" for Michelle, to realize 5 minutes later that we might have to change our plans for the night because she had indeed purchased tickets for that concert. Silly me :). Anyway we still had time for our first part of the evening plan: using up our Mc Cormic and Shmick coupons for a nice (free) dinner. We then biked to the Roseland Theater for LCD Soundsystem's concert. While waiting for the show I spotted an upcoming group I really wanted to see, so I started the night in quite a good mood (Tinariwen is coming in 3 weeks and we now have tickets also). We got out all sweaty and tired (i.e. the concert was good :)). This is going to be quite a concert heavy month for us, we're also going to see the New Pornographers and OBT's Bolero, and yes I know that covers quite a wide musical genre spectrum.

We met our usual group of friends Sunday noon for a barbecue picnic at Irving park. It was a nice, slightly rainy relaxed afternoon spent playing Frisbee and chatting around a beer or two. We got back home to have a couple over for an apero; we had discovered about 2 weeks ago that there was a French guy working at Intel that was living in the tower next to ours, so we've been carpooling since and wanted to meet his wife as well.

Monday was mostly about writing thank-you cards: done! We enjoyed the end of the sunny afternoon at the riverfront looking at the 1000 flags that had been erected there for memorial day (Le jour des anciens combatants).

The display was quite moving and the lighting was making it even more dramatic.

The rose festival was also going on this weekend, but considering our poor experience last year we didn't go...

Bay area, or the Chinese food weekend

Last weekend I took advantage of a business trip to stop in the Bay Area. We spent the weekend with M's mom and enjoyed the area. Saturday I took them to Big Basin Redwood Park where we enjoyed the sight of a forest of giant trees. Just to give you an idea of the dimensions:


We finished the day by a Chinese Banquet with KY's old classmates and friends (I don't think I've ever had that much Chinese food in a meal).
The next day we met an old friend of M's for a Dim Sum brunch and headed for the Golden Gate. The view on San Francisco was crystal clear:

The bridge always as impressive as ever and I got M and KY to discover a viewpoint they didn't know of:

It felt like the perfect day to sail around the bay, that reminded me a day a while back Katel, Frl and I sailed around in Eric's boat.

We continued the relax afternoon by a walk on windy Pier 39, having an ice cream or two, watching the street shows and enjoying the view on Alcatraz. We spent quite some time looking at this French Luxury Restaurant Boat (with 2 American flags) which was built by some eccentric billionaire.

We finished the day with even more Chinese food at a dinner with M's relatives.
The rest of the series is here.

For Tristan

Last time I tried to bring friends to the fire station, the trucks were out. Today they came straight home after the fire alarm rang. Thankfully it was a small fire and not on our floor, and the time out waiting for them to inundate the floor and the one below gave me the opportunity to take pictures of the trucks.

You can check the rest of the series here.

Nice weather is back...

...and it's time to restart getting some exercise I suppose. M has been kicking my a.. rightfully to get me to exercise more and the past few days have been quite good. 900m swim Friday, 11.5 miles bicycle yesterday and a 3 miles run this morning with some time at the gym after.
That obviously made me hungry, and this is the best occasion for me to show you the nice griddle we received for our wedding which has been working wonders. Yum-yum.

Apple-cranberry chicken links with asparagus, the griddle is the only way I managed to get them tender and crunchy at the same time.

Ecola Park

I am still trying to go through the pictures I took while Fifille was here. Here is one from Ecola Park I like (I recommand looking at the large version).


And here the classic view towards Cannon Beach from Ecola.

Fall Creek Falls

I had a hike as a Bachelor Party (to the disappointment of some). It was great, the falls were quite impressive with all the snow-melt that has been going on lately.


We finished the hike in the snow and we ended up playing a bit the local favorite lumberjack baseball. Danny won by picking the largest trunk around to swing.


Melvin sneaking around with a mini snowball.


Everybody else: guess who is who.


On the way back we stopped at Walking Wan brewery and finished the night at Deschutes brewery. Good friends, good outdoors, good beer, great day.

Visitors

Last weekend, a bunch of visitors arrived. We took them around quite a bit. Here they are in the Columbia gorges.


A lot of things have been going on as you'd probably guess, I'll post more complete updates (like pictures of my great bachelor hike) as things settle.

Angel's Rest

Last weekend I had a visitor at home and took him on a hike on Saturday with a group of local friends (while M. was slaving away working on our escort and table cards in Seattle with K.). I picked Angel's rest because it was one of the few short hikes I had not done in the gorges and the view from atop was supposed to be beautiful. I wasn't disappointed, the weather was amazingly sunny and warm, the trail up nice and steep and the view... amazing. Only downside: it was a bit too popular.


Great trail in the forest.


Great view.


Great Company.

The rest of the pictures can be found here.