Jazz A Vienne

In late june & july we spent a couple of days in Vienne attending the jazz festival.
Jazz festivals are really popular in France and every village in France with some self-respect have its own festival. Vienne is one of the bigger ones competing with festival as the one in Montreux.
The nice thing with Vienne is that they have a ancient Roman amphitheatre they use as stage, since the theatre is situated on a hill you have a nice view of the sunset and the surrounding valley. We attended to concerts with: Diana Krall, Elvis Costello, Wayne Shorter and Brad Meldau.

July was good!

Today was my second day at work after the vacation, and it is ok to be back. To summarise the summer in one word is amazing, there have been more activities than I ever could imagined. However it started with quite cold, unstable and rainy weather in June but improved a lot around midsummer. We have been having stable weather since then with around 30 degrees and sunny weather.

In July we managed to pull of the following activities, this is also the reason why I not have updated the blogg that frequently:

• Hiking to the top of Dent de Crolles
• Downhill biking in Alpes d'Huez
  
• Skiing at the Les 2 Alpes glacier
  
• River rafting in parc Vanoise
• Hiking the mighty Mont Aigille in the Vercors Plateau
  
• Hiking to the waterfall of Orsière and spending the night camping at an altitude of 2000m at the mountain lake of Lac Robert
• Attending the Jazz festival in Vienne twice
• A weekend down in the Mediterranean visiting Cassis & the islands of Porquerolles
• Biking up to the 1968 Olympic ski jumping facility in St Nizier on the Vercors Plateau
  

Surprising is that I started to do crazy stuff as biking and running up and down mountain slopes. Perhaps the most crazy activity was the downhill biking, where you descend from mountains on narrow, icy and sometimes very snowy paths. See some picture below from that particular event.

Grenoble

I just realised that I have written a lot of stuff about places outside Grenoble and not about the main place of events. However it is true that the strength of Grenoble actually lies in its surroundings. Because Grenoble really is an outdoor and nature lovers paradise. There are three mountain ranges just next to the city and all of them have some unique properties. They all have ski facilities, however one tend to forget the summer activities. The summer activities is just as fun with mountain biking or hiking. All the mountain trails seem full with almost endless views, waterfalls and beautiful sceneries. Surprisingly there are also a lot of people doing water sports like sailing wind- and kite-surfing in the surrounding mountain lakes. No wonder that the Grenoblians can consume sometimes 3 desserts during lunch and not looking too chubby.
Well anyway back to the town itself, there are a lot uninteresting and greyish Soviet style suburbs which I never tend to visit, I rather stay close to the city centre with its broad avenues its building in Hausmann style architecture to the small narrow paths through the old town. Of course there are numerous of cafe's and bars all over the place where you can sit and take a sip of coffee or pastis.