THis trip was becoming a disaster and I could not have been happier. 3:00 a.m. and water pelted down hard on the tent. So loud it sounded like someone pummeling REI’s best with a rug-beater, sheets of Sierra rain hit and ran down toward Bass Lake. We were camping, my rugged husband and I, at an age when some people ...

Kellie is a thinker and writer who loves to play with clay. Married and raising a teenager, this local scribe spends time cooking for family and complaining about caring for a menagerie including two dogs, three cats, one lizard, two fish and ten heritage hens. In the unlikely event that she wins the Nobel Prize in any category, Kellie remains ...

Notice the barely perceptible figure in the bottom left of this shot of Mont Blanc with lenticular cloud. Here’s a closer view of the same climber. Nice rocks. Notice his belayer below him. As a Search and Rescue helicopter appears he seems to be signaling to it. A rescuer is lowered and the two of them are lifted off. We ...

■■■■■ A Definite MUST read! □□□□ Really good. You should read it! □□□ It was okay, I finished it. Something was missing. □□ Read it if you’ve already read the cereal box twice. □ Time I’ll never get back. Probably didn’t finish it. Looking for Alaska By John Green Publication Date 2005 John Green does an excellent job transporting the ...

Not just a catchy subject line. This was our classy two story decorative birdhouse on our front porch as of yesterday afternoon, although the photo was taken last year and the bluebird did not end up nesting there.

It was a dark and cloudy late afternoon when the GPS finally found our B&B at Plateau D’Assy, above Chamonix in the French Alps, and we wondered if we would ever see the mountains

On a wet june day, we visited the medieval walled city of Avignon on the banks of the Rhone, and one of the few French cities to have preserved its ramparts. We parked outside the walls and spent the day exploring the thriving town of 100,000.

A wild “boar” (sanglier) spots me in the mountains of Corsica: It moves in further for the attack: but fortunately decides to wallow a bit instead: Evidently these are free range pigs, because they were out in the middle of nowhere with no farm or farmer in sight: This real wild boar. Must have been a road kill for someone ...

Continuing on from Provence towards the Alps, we sidetracked a little to spend a couple nights in the Vercors Regional Natural Park, a beautiful massif above Grenoble, of green hillsides, rocky gorges with rivers, and limestone cliffs and caves. On the way, we stopped at this town below, Serre, for one of the best meals of our trip, a huge ...

After our week in Corsica we continued on to Lourmarin, a charming village in Provence, where we spent a few days at the residence of kind friendsof ours and from which we made a couple of forays in the Luberon National Park area, with its colorful hilltop villages, like Bonnieux, below, where we made the mistake of accidentally driving through ...