The Paris walks week

Early February before classes ramped up I took five walks in seven days around Paris. The Orange route is about 5.5 miles. Non-stop it would have been two hours but I managed to make it five hours with sightseeing and going café to café.

There were to be others during the coming months but I grew tired of mapping each of them. There were too many.

Paris - The view from my window

I moved to Paris to take French classes at the Sorbonne.

Velux 5 Oceans starts

La Rochelle - It's been an exciting month watching from my balcony the bustling activity in the Race Village surrounding the trawler port. Today was the culmination of the preparation -- the start of the around the world solo race.

La Rochelle Year 2 - The view from my window

My submission for Andrew Sullivan's feature.

La Rochelle France. 8:45am. Facing northeast. From the 4th floor (American), 3rd floor (France). From the kitchen / living room, having breakfast. The trawler harbor of La Rochelle France with the stern of the French meteorological survey ship France I which is the centerpiece of the Musée Maritime de La Rochelle.

Train Crash

Today I was in a train crash. A German ICE high-speed train from Frankfurt to Paris. A truck had fallen onto the tracks. We were doing 60 mph I believe. Much less than the 180 mph we would be doing later in France. I thought I was going to die but I only sprained my back. Not much more I want to say about it. The photo speaks for itself. A month later I would be feeling fine.

Ice train crashes into garbage truck

 
Raw news footage from YouTube (below). When you see the broken out window, that's where I was sitting. It was car #1 at the front of the train, derailed by the impact and sliced open along its entire length on the side where I was sitting. Interior filming at the 3:54 mark is from my car #1. You can see the path of destruction down the side where I was sitting.

August vacation 2010

During two weeks I added Bergen, Flåm, and Oslo Norge; Stockholm Sverige; Vienna Österreich; and München Deutschland to my travel map of Europe (France travel not included in map). The last day of the trip was a disaster.

Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series

La Rochelle - It was a weekend of extreme sports in La Rochelle. The Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series came to town.