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Corsica!
France made a wise decision in acquiring Corsica, a place that posesses beauty to compete with anything I’ve ever seen. It has jagged peaks to match the rockies, carved red stone to match the deserts of Utah, and beaches as beautiful as anything I’ve seen in the Carribean. Scatter about that landscape castles, fortresses, and…
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The French Riviera/Cote d’Azure
The French riviera, while not the most beautiful of all the places I’ve visited, has a cornucopia of attributes to justify it being one of the best places to live in the world. Its agreeable climate, miles of gorgeous coastline, snow capped coastal range, deep canyons, and pastoral countryside concentrated in such a small geographic…
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The French
The other day on the train I caught myself looking with confusion at their faces, their fingers, their legs and it actually surprised me how similar they looked to me despite how alien their words and culture seemed to be. To paraphrase Bill Bryson, “Germans are flumoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of…
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Fighting fires in France
Tonight’s European adventure was fighting brush fire in the French coastal town of Menton. As I was returning to my hostel after dinner downtown, I saw a plume of black smoke rising from the hill in front of me. Typically smoke from an intentional fire burns white, but this was a dense column of black.…
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Hoofing it through hostels
Staying in hostels has been its own travel experience, and the places vary greatly. I’ve had a room with as few as four beds in it and one with as many as 20. Most are single sex, but one morning I opened my eyes to see the silhouette of a statuesque blond brushing her as…
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Paris to Nice
Paris was at first overwhelming, but my experience improved significantly once I found that you could rent public bicycles by the hour. There’s something magical about flying through streets like blood through veins. And something you may not know if you’ve never ridden in a city is that a bike puts you just a bit higher…
