Another "jour tranquile" in Bonneville

 We spent another quiet day in Bonneville.  Three weeks in we're halfway through our French vacation!

Bonneville is a lovely town - here is the Hotel de Ville (city hall) ...

... and just a random street ...

We did a bit of shopping, including the famous "Cheese World".

We've been eating a LOT of cheese!

Sonya was hankering to do some gardening, so we stopped by the local garden center.

As you might expect, the garden centre has an extensive wine/beer selection, with all local products!

And other local products as well, including their own cheese bar.

The results of our labour!

(I should have done a before/after shot, but just imagine a bunch of empty pots ...)

Next stop, we're doing a day trip to Geneva!

Mont Blanc Take 2 ...

We did a road trip to Chamonix and rode the gondola up Mont Blanc.  Take 2 for me & Sonya but Shelley wanted to see "mountains" and around here Mont Blanc is what you get!  We booked the day before our drive (trying to fit the trip in before the forecast rain) so our gondola ride was in the afternoon.  We drove up in the morning however and had some cafe and wandered about town.

Here are some loungers we found, Chamonix is a town of giants!

At the very top you can climb into a little glass cube - "into the void".

Here we are after we looked down and saw basically 10,000 feet of nothing.

Here is me with Mont Blanc in the background (the lift takes you up a slightly smaller mountain, only 4810 metres).

A view of "level 3" from "level 2", you can just make out the glass cube at the right of the top level.  It has a glass floor so you can see basically to the bottom of the cliff.  Frightening!

And here is a view of "level 2" from "level 3".

(From my previous Chamonix/Mont Blanc post, we only did the gondola ride to levels 1 and 2.  Our beautiful lake hike (which we were planning to do again but ran out of time unfortunately) was on "level 1".  You take a gondola up to level 1, change to a second gondola to get to level 2, and then an elevator to level 3.)

On to Milan!

We got an early start on our trip to Milan, leaving our Casale Monferrato Airbnb at 6:30am sharp.

(We booked a Duomo tour in Milan for 9am.  Due to a bad case of Vacation Brain, we booked the tour for 9am Saturday instead of 9am Sunday, so we had to break camp early in Casale Monferrato in order to make it to Milan in time.  We arrived at the Duomo at 9am sharp just in time for our tour.)

We walked up the stairs to the rooftop of the Duomo and did the rooftop tour (I think about 280 steps, check my Strava ;-)).

Here is the Duomo from ground level.

We also did the Duomo interior tour, here is St Bartholomew (flayed alive wearing his skin, gotta love religious art).

And a more traditional church image.

Afterwards we went to Luini's for a snack (on instructions from Emiliano).

Then a walkabout town looking for lunch.

After lunch we went to the Duomo museum (we had the Duomo "multipass" and were squeezing out all the value).  The museum had models of literally thousands of the sculptures that comprised the Duomo and they were all very different, it was really a very impressive display.  There were also some images of the stained glass (looking for some ideas for a stained glass piece for myself).

The most impressing thing for me was a scale model of the Duomo itself, you can really appreciate all the detail in the construction.

In the evening we met my colleague Emiliano for an introduction to Milano life - drinks and apperitivo's!

That was just day 1!!!

On our second day in Milan we did a lot of walking!  We decided to see the art gallery, so we took a walk past the Duomo (again) ...

And through the "Rinascente Milano Piazza Duomo" (basically a big mall, you can see it to the left above) ...

All the stores are high-end designers, and there are lineups to get into each store, and security guards at each store managing the traffic.

We didn't get into the art gallery unfortunately, because it was sold out for the day.  (Hot tip - pretty much anywhere you go in Europe check if you can buy tickets online in advance.)

We had some gigantic pizzas for lunch (neither Sonya nor Shelley is going to be able to face pizza now for the rest of the trip) and then took a walk through some non-tourist areas to admire Milan architecture.

In the evening we did a boat canal cruise, which was a bit of a bust (hop tip - spend your 57 Euros on literally ANYTHING else) however we did see a bunch of people sitting by the canal, so that's where we wandered over to after the cruise.

(Sonya bought 2 new dresses at a market, which is so far the highlight of her holiday, check out one of her purchases below.)

 

The next day we broke camp and headed "home" to Bonneville.  We stopped in Aosta (small Italian town about an hour from the Mont Blanc tunnel) for lunch and some sightseeing.  All the castles were closed unfortunately (because ...  Monday?) but we say this old ruin in town.

This is a view of the mountains from downtown Aosta.  Beautiful small towns like this are a dime a dozen over here.

We arrived back in Bonneville with some rain in the forecast, I'll update our Bonneville adventures in my next post!

Casale Monferrato

 (I'm a few days behind on posting so bear with me!)

It rained on our second day in Monferrato, so we picked up a couple of umbrellas and walked around town in the rain!

We started with breakfast at a local cafe - toast with ham and gorgonzola, and cappuccino.  It was a fortuitous choice of cafe, because it was outside under an awning, and as soon as we sat down it started raining very heavily!  We were in one of the few cafe's that didn't have to immediately pack up their patio.

After the rain settled down we went for a stroll, randomly walking up and down the narrow streets.

We were admiring the churches (and other random buildings, which were all incredible) when a local invited us to explore a local courtyard.

Turns out most buildings in Casale Monferrato are built around courtyards.  Some have nice gardens, some are just converted to parking.  Some are open and some are hidden behind large doors.

This street has a nice cafe (featured in the previous post).

This is the main courtyard of the town, and in the background the yellow building is where we are staying.

And this is our courtyard.  (If you walk straight through you will come to the first elevator we mistakenly took on our first day.  Our elevator is just inside the gate to the right.)

We visited the tourist info office (I think they were glad to see some actual tourists for a change!) and walked around the local fort (or castle, I'm not sure which) - it's been converted to offices, a cafe (also featured in the previous post) and I think some private residences as well.

Since it was raining we did indoor tours of the local church and museum.

And we had dinner at the Accademia Ristorante - it was on the second floor of an old building and was actually fairly difficult to find.  Up a stairway and through a large room ...

The door to the restaurant is at the back to the left, in the above photo.  NOT clearly marked at all.  There was a private party in an adjoining room that we almost ended up joining!

After Casale Monferrato we spent a couple of days in Milan, which will be the subject of my next post!