A Blast from the Past

In July, one of my dear (I was going to say old, but we're not old, right?!) friends from high school came and visited us. It was so fun to have Wendy and Dave here, and looking back on the pictures, we really covered a lot of ground with them!

The first day, we went into Grenoble and went up the bubbles to check out the view from the Bastille overlooking the Grenoble valley.

Wendy and Dave, and Dave's camera.

The insta-fam!

Along the Drac River with the bubbles in the background. Piper, turn around!

After a great lunch at one of the pizzarias on pizza row downtown, we headed up into the mountains behind our house. We planned to do a little hike near the Dent de Crolles, but ended up going all the way up to the peak of Pravouta, a part of the Chartreuse massif.

Just as we started on the trail, we heard a bunch of sheep bells and sheep, so we ran back to the start of the trail and this is what we saw:

Literally thousands of sheep were being herded up the road and up the trail we were on to the higher pastures.

We hopped up onto this bank and were surrounded by the sheep on both sides massing through the woods on the trail and heading up into the pastures. It was loud and crazy and really fun. A truly authentic French alps moment!

Finally, the end of the flock - herd?

Here are the happy sheep enjoying the grass in the higher pastures. As you can imagine, we had to watch our step on the trail up after following that many sheep!

Heading up to the Col de Pravouta, Dave was kind enough to keep Piper on the trail and moving.

It was really sweet and Piper was attached to him the whole climb.

Wendy and I just tried to keep up with the other two mountain goats, I mean boys :)

Col du Coq is where we started (to the left) and we decided to go up to Pravouta and came back down on the other side (to the right) back to the Col du Coq, so about 4km with a few hundred meters' climb.

At the top of Pravouta.

We brought up a kite and Piper brought along bubbles. The kite didn't work so well as the wind was gusting too much.

But the bubbles were fantastic. You just had to hold the wand into the wind and the bubbles would form and fly away with the wind.

Wendy and Dave at the peak of Pravouta.

A couple of NW High school girls in France. Who woulda thought?!

And here, Wendy is checking out the Dent de Crolles. We didn't have enough time (or energy, since I ended up carrying Piper 1/2 the way down after he ran out of steam) to do the Dent de Crolles this time. They'll just have to come back again for that one!

Next up - our day trip to Avignon and Provence....