ARRIVAL - Chamonix Mont Blanc

When we initially started planning this vacation, we seriously contemplated going to Chamonix in the winter. One tiny complication: Noah doesn't know how to ski and was going to have to learn before we went. Which he was going to do. I mean, we had over a year. 

But then we realized that if we went in winter, we would only see winter. And I wanted to go back to the sea. So we settled on summer and maybe some other time in winter. 

Stock photo of Chamonix in winter

Originally, our trip was going to be one week in Chamonix. Then it grew to a few more days in Nice. Then somehow I added on a whole week going to Switzerland. We ended up with an amazing itinerary giving us two full weeks exploring these amazing places. 

The Road to Chamonix

After our amazing breakfast in Nice we took the bus to the airport and picked up our rental car. A new white Citroen. Manual transmission. Noah did all the driving (alas, the real reason I brought him along). 

The shortest route from Nice to Chamonix is via Italy and the tunnel du Mont-Blanc; seven miles of scary tunnel under Aiguille du Midi. When you map it out on google it looks like it takes about 4.5 hours. I didn’t realize there was going to be a tunnel though. And it’s at the end, connecting Italy to France. 

So we are driving along through Southeastern France, paying tolls every so often; a euro here, a euro there. Driving along the beautiful and completely lovely Mediterranean coast for maybe an hour. 

Then we were in Italy and it suddenly the landscape changed immensely. The buildings were all jammed up on on top of the other in a chaotic fashion. We almost immediately turned north though and lost sight of the sea completely. That was a little sad.

As we climbed in altitude we had to go through a lot of tunnels. The tunnels made me really nervous for some reason. However, for some opposite reason Noah kept speeding up, like, really fast through the tunnels. I was kind of a nervous wreck and kept telling him to slow down but he really didn’t listen at all. I was SO GLAD when the tunnels were behind us and we were on a high plateau with no tunnels. 

But all the signs were in Italian!

We had pretty much figured out enough French to know how to get around, but now we had a whole new language in road signs. 

And instead of $1 - 2 euro tolls, they were $34 - 40 euro tolls! What the heck??!! Must have been all those tunnels. They are probably expensive. 

Finally we could see the mountains and WE WERE SO EXCITED!!! We were almost there! We would be at our hotel by 1pm ish and have the whole day ahead of us to explore Chamonix. 

Our first view of Mont Blanc.

Then, traffic stopped. 

One and a half miles in front of the tunnel through the mountain. 

The sign, which looked like a permanent fixture, said it would be 90 minutes to the tunnel. Really? Why?? Was there a crash? What was going on? All the cars were stopped. Dead. Just. Stopped. A couple cars even turned around. I don’t know where they thought they were going if they wanted to go to Chamonix because the other way around was hours and hours. 

We saw a lovely Italian village just this side of the mountain.

So we crawled at the slowest absolute pace up to the tunnel. 

And here’s the deal. In 1999 there was a horrid crash inside the tunnel and people were trapped and died. So now they meter the traffic. All vehicles have to be 150 meters apart. I learned this as I was using up the last of my phone battery for entertainment while waiting in line for the tunnel. So it took 1.5 hours to go 1.5 miles to get to the tunnel opening. After that it was a breeze. 

Stock photo of tunnel entrance in Italy

Oh, and the toll was $50 euro to go through the tunnel. 

Finally we emerged on the other side of the tunnel and we were once again in France! Oh, how we love France! 

We drove down an extremely steep switchback road and ended up in the most adorable town on the planet.

Somehow Noah found our hotel, Le Faucigny, where we discovered two Atom cars in the extremely limited free parking area. Noah got photos of those. I missed the memo on how awesome Atoms are because I was unimpressed. They were in my parking spot. No photos. Sorry. Too bad.

We were able to park in a temp spot and unload our stuff. Yanika,  who spoke perfect English and was so unbelievable friendly, understanding, and helpful, checked us in and helped us lug our bags up to our room. 

Then she showed us on the map where to park. 

Which was kind of a hike, but that was ok since we planned on walking most everywhere again. Here is a swift flowing river we met on the walk. It runs right through the town.

Here is the glacier on Mont Blanc. 

Yes. This was the view out of our hotel window. We were beyond excited.

We had dinner at an amazing restaurant, explored the town a bit, and got the scoop on where to start our ascent to Lac Blanc the next day. 

And that is another whole story. Stay tuned! 

I LOVE FRANCE

First Installment: Nice, France

I have been meaning to chronicle my amazing France and Switzerland vacation of August 2014 since the day I left. Alas, time has passed and I must put fingers to keys and bring the adventure back to life.

First we will go to the French Riviera where my oldest son Noah and I began the adventure we had been planning for over a year. 

By some miracle there is a direct flight to Nice from Montreal. While our layover in Montreal was 9 hours, at least we didn’t have to stop somewhere in the middle of the night. 

Landing early in Nice we were a tad jet lagged, weighed down by luggage (mostly mine), hot, and unsure of how to get to the hotel. 

We started the trip thinking we were going to conserve dollars, thus we had agreed to take the bus to the hotel. I don’t know, didn’t seem that cheap and the driver didn’t speak much English, but somehow we managed to pick out enough words to get off at the right stop ... sort of. But you walk everywhere anyway, unless you want to brave that ridiculous traffic, so it was perfect happiness to trudge through town, sweaty and tired, with our luggage. 

Allow me to take a brief pause here and explain, “why Nice?” and “why Noah?”. In 2011 my husband and my youngest son, Nick, took a Mediterranean cruise and one of our stops was in Cannes, right next door to Nice. We loved Cannes. We fell in love with France on that trip. When I sent Noah a picture of Nick’s lunch in a Facebook message, Noah wrote back, “new souvenir request: France”. And three years later I was able to honor that request. 

The deal was, I bought the airline tickets and hotel and car and he bought his own food and adventure. He ended up helping out with gas and some other things too, for which I was grateful. 

Because France is expensive. 

At the beginning, where we spent our first two days in Nice, we took little care, other than the bus ride, on how much we spent and proceeded to eat our way through the town. It wasn’t until we landed in Switzerland a week later that we took to going to the grocery store and eating sack lunches. 

FYI - if you ever go to Switzerland, plan on spending a lot of money. On every single tiny thing you purchase. If you have a problem with this, don’t go. Just be happy and spend money. I was able to overcome this dilemma and had a great time.  

But I digress. We are still in France. Nice to be exact. We are barely at the hotel. Which was awesome. 

Our room wasn’t quite ready so we headed to the roof, where there is a pool, and looked out upon the amazing Mediterranean Sea.

I have lived in Michigan all my life, growing up near the great lakes, spending weeks and weeks of my childhood on Lake Michigan swimming in the icy water, exploring the lake and the rocks and the beach and the woods. And I plan to retire on the shore of Lake Superior someday. 

I love the clear, cool (ok, cold) lake water. I love the stillness on a summer day; the stars on a cloudless night. I love the wild of the upper peninsula and the gusting winds that come off the shore of that great lake. Rock hunting with my friend Debi who knows the shores so well. 

Yet despite my love for the great lakes Michigan and Superior, my favorite body of water on this planet, that I have met thus far, is the Mediterranean Sea. 

The Mediterranean Sea has a volcanic bottom, which means there isn’t much sand. This makes the water sparkle with color, changing from aqua to cobalt blue and so clear you can see into the depths beyond measure. 

Mists come off the sea constantly, rendering the air a special character of light; lavender and peach. And mysterious.

We had a couple $14 euro each drinks on the roof and decided to walk to the beach and swim. Noah was all hot to get a moped (we hadn’t even checked into our rooms yet) but finally he joined me at the beach, where he found me asleep on the rocks. Eventually I talked him in to going into the water. Then I couldn’t get him out. 

The beach in Nice mesmerizes me. It is made of rounded stones of varying sizes. The sound of the waves as they come in and out is like nothing I have heard, water and air rustling over the stones, back and forth. So soothing to the spirit. 

The waves were totally there for us. We stayed in the water forever just floating up and down on the swells about 20 feet from shore. We kind of had to be sure we were ready when we got out because it was a bit of an ordeal to clamber up the stony cliff shaped by the waves, oochy ouchy on the feet. 

Finally our room was ready and we checked in, changed, and began our assault on the French Riviera. Noah got his moped and I explored the town.

In front of our hotel was a promenade. It was the coolest thing! Every few minutes a hundred water fountains would erupt out of the cobbled surface into the sky. Children as well as adults played in these fountains all day long. It was quite a sight and lasted into the night. 

Day two was pretty much a repeat with the addition of a shopping trip and an exploration up to the top of the promontory first thing in the morning before it got hot. The view of the city to the East was beautiful. We saw people snorkling in the deep water. We saw the marina. We saw airplane after airplane land and take off from the airport. We took an evening stroll on the stony beach and breathed in the sultry summer air of the Mediterranean. 

I love France. It is my favorite place in the world. Happily, almost everyone in the French Riviera speaks English because our “French phrase book” never really left the bag. 

We learned about French wines from a wine seller. We learned that the restaurant owners could tell in seconds that we didn’t speak French when they quickly handed us menus in English. We learned that French is a fun language and thus the people are a happy lot. They make terrific food and live amongst beautiful scenery every day. 

The morning we left for northern France we had a delicious breakfast of cappuccino and salmon at a cafe. 

Next installment: Chamonix in the French Alps. 

What is Vintage?

What is vintage, really?
According to Wikipedia, "Generally speaking, clothing which was produced before the 1920s is referred to as antique clothing and clothing from the 1920s to 20 years before the present day is considered vintage. Retro, short for retrospective, or "vintage style" usually refers to clothing that imitates the style of a previous era."

Vintage teacup and saucer

According to answer.com, "vintage is considered to be items that are at least 20 years old. At this point, anything from the 80s and 70s would be considered to be vintage. It is antique when it is at least 50 years old, so at this point (2012) anything from 1962 and later."

Regardless of our working definition, vintage clothing and vintage items remain desirable in the consumer market. 

Featured here are a couple shops on Etsy currently successfully marketing vintage items. I can only imagine what their storerooms look like or how they keep track of all this stuff, to say nothing of the logistics in packing it up and shipping it out! 

There are all types of vintage items available in the online marketplace; photographs, postcards, jewelry, pottery, kitchenware, teacups, pitchers, housewares, clothing, toys, artwork. I have selected a few items from some of my favorite shops to feature here. Feel free to click on each item to see details on their shop page. 

These items are from Michele Caron's shop, Finding Maine Vintage

Lovely vintage lithograph

Vintage Brass Cups

Porcelain trinket box

Imagine all the wonderful things you could hide in here!












Ginger's Little Gems carries vintage jewelry and figurines.

 

Check out these green and white rhinestone earrings! 

And this completely adorable Royal Doulton figurine!

How would you like to serve your next glass of 

ice tea with this?

Ridgway and Son Antique pitcher, 1840 

Switching gears a bit takes us to vintage clothing ....

Here are some vintage women's shoes from the 1980s ... remember these?

atVintage is a classy storefront with a unique style of its own. 

She carries unusual and useful vintage items that bring us back in time to bygone days, memories long forgotten at the cottage.

Vintage housewares are still usable and with their tarnished look have their own glow and personality. 

 Can you just imagine pulling these out of the drawer on a Sunday morning to serve your meal? What a treat!

I just LOVE the tarnished look. 

  

Or maybe just showcase them on your curio cabinet.

Finally, one of my very favorite vintage shops, French Vintage Dream, carries vintage French items. 

Jane carries clothing and housewares of a wide variety. Here are some of my favorites. 

Love lace ....

Need a sexy nightie? 

Or some mint green with your espresso today? 

Regardless of your vintage persuasion, there is something for everyone!

Enjoy!

Perfume Story

I would like to tell you our perfume story. The Savvy Soap has recently developed a new product line - natural, handmade perfumes! 

The story goes something like this .... somewhere along the line, probably in the middle of the night or while driving to work, or walking the dogs, it occurred to me that I wanted to learn more about making fragrances. And thus the online research began. 

Most of the free online information available about making fragrances was lacking sophistication and true knowledge. 

Hello Amazon, my good and faithful friend. 

Just two books and two weeks later I found information and sources for my perfume supplies and started developing a plan. 

It takes about four weeks for a perfume mixture to "cure", or mellow; for the ingredients to get to know each other and decide if they like each other. 

We started out with six prototypes. Of these we kept three. Our success rate increased. Jim likes almost all of them. I don't care for the bitter notes and just assume toss those but he likes them. 

Smells are really hard to describe. 

Geranium and chamomile smell bitter to me, but they are heavily used floral perfumes. So I compromised and got some Rose Geranium oil and I like it much better. 

There are different ways to categorize aromas. 

Earth ... Woody ... Foodie ... Floral ... Citrus

or, by family:

Citrus ... Floral ... Oriental ... Fougere ... Chypre

And the aromas that make up the aroma families overlap with each other. Very confusing. But necessary when it comes to categorizing and describing the fragrance, especially in an online marketplace where you can't provide a smell strip. 

Most of our perfumes are unisex, because that's just the way it is nowadays. Even the florals - one of my husband's favorites is a floral. It's because the ingredients are so much more complex than what we use in our soaps or lotions. 
Whereas in a lotion or soap we use one to three essential oils or fragrances, in perfumes we use up to ten or twelve aromas including base, middle and top notes, balanced in some form or fashion.

After time, the base notes will be the ones to linger longest.

Top notes waft away quickly, which means using a natural or synthetic fixative comes in handy. 

I love finding a complementary mixture of base, middle, and top notes and tend to really dig the base notes, such as vetiver, patchouli, cedarwood, vanilla ... 

Base notes are so important because they grab on to those lofty top notes (florals and citrus; the ones everyone likes) and help them stick around a little longer. 

Lots of foodies in the middle ... rosemary, thyme ...  as well as exotics like ylang ylang and rose. 

Currently we offer 1/3 ounce bottles, which are super handy for traveling. Just stick in your carry on and no worries about that big bottle of perfume or cologne breaking and spilling all over your luggage when they ever not so gracefully toss or throw your bag onto the conveyor belt at the airport. 

Winter Story

Ok, so it really has been a long time. 

Nick, Noah, Lola at Tahquamenon Falls. 

What a lovely holiday we had. My sister came over for a few days, and my brother drove up from Illinois with his boys. My oldest son came over and we were all together for Christmas day. It was a peaceful and quiet celebration. 

My brother fell in love with my dog and asked for a picture with him and Applejack wearing his jammies. 














And then we got some snow! 


This winter is nothing compared to last winter, but I love snow and was happy to finally get some after a brown Christmas. 

Here is Jim with the three dogs on the trail that is about a mile from our home. It's a nice mile or so walk through the woods on a paved trail that they kept, mostly, clear of snow and ice. It traverses a river as well. We go there at least once a week and watch the seasons while we all get some exercise. It has added a new appreciation for winter to go out in it every day. 

Last weekend we took the 45 minute drive to Yankee Springs where they have an awesome 3 mile loop that goes past the lake. I really love it there, wish it was a little closer, but we had a wonderful walk up and down the hills and on the frozen lake. Here is me with Applejack.  

Back in February, to celebrate my oldest and youngest sons' birthdays, we went to the upper peninsula in Michigan and stayed with a friend and went DOG SLEDDING!!! 

It was so fun. Noah and Nick got to mush their own sleds. Noah had six dogs, Nick's had five. Debi and I sat happily in our own sled, mushed by the owner of Nature Kennels, with 12 dogs. And watched the beautiful winter landscape on our ten mile route. They had 4 feet of snow up there! 

Nick, me, Noah in back, Debi.

Our ride up was interesting. After we crossed the Mackinaw bridge it just kept getting colder and colder. By the time we reached McMillan it was -19 degrees. My car refused to go over 60mph. That night it went down to -25. It was +7 while we were sledding .... kind of chilly!

Here are the dogs coming in to home base.  

The next day we went to Tahquamenon Falls. I love the way the waterfall freezes in so many colors, blue and gold and rust. 

 

Icicles hanging from a ledge. We took a walk on the "do not enter - danger" trail that was closed because we knew it would be awesome and it did not disappoint.