France

Matsumoto, or the Crow Castle, on a bitter cold December morning with the Japanese Alps in the backdrop.

5:00 am Walks

I am not a morning person. The early bird can take as many worms as it would like, and I wouldn’t care. Which is why, this blog title is special. There has to be something special about the location or…

Mont Blanc on a moonlit night

The Mont Blanc Experience

Chamonix is a charming little town sitting in the shadow of Mont Blanc and the Bossons Glacier - a welcome respite from the madness of crossing Mont Blanc.
Barbed wire along the bluff tops at the Normandy coast, looking towards Omaha Beach

75th Anniversary of D-Day

This June 6th marked the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. Two of the most difficult operations carried out on June 6th 1944 were the takeover of Pointe du Hoc and the landing of the first troops at Omaha Beach.…

An idyllic village in Normandy, a few miles away from the D-Day beaches

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

During the Battle of Normandy (Normandie), a staggering 425,000 troops were killed, wounded or went missing. Roughly half of these were Allied troops and the other half German. The Allies also captured an additional 200,000 prisoners of war, whose fate…

Slowing Down in Loire Valley

It has been 7 years since we drove through France’s Loire Valley in 2009, a fantasy land of fairy-tale chateaus big and small, ranging from the magnificent Chateau Chambord, the idyllic Azay le Rideau, the decorative Chenonceau, the magnificent gardens of Villandry, the…