Chamonix, near Mont Blanc. We were pleasantly surprised at how attractive it was. I guess that’s because I had only read accounts by mountaineers and climbers, and they emphasized how touristy it is and how the French climbers are so sloppy and leave garbage all over the campgrounds. So here are a few pics, mostly of the architecture. We didn’t ...

A few nights in the attractive city of Annecy left us wishing for more. Sometimes called the Venice of France it has canals, a lake, castles, great food, dungeons and more.

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 ...

Deep underground in Poland lies something remarkable but little known outside Eastern Europe .For centuries, miners have extracted salt there, but left behind things quite startling and unique. Take a look at the most unusual salt mine in the world.

So we’ve been back from Haiti for about a week now. Back to where a cool place can be found, back to running water and warm showers. It is nice to be home. It’s curious to me that, at least in the short term, mosquitoes, broken cars and dusty roads leave the deepest impressions of Haiti. These are the subjects ...

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 ...