InvictaMoto's Family Travels

The scenic railway is called the "Train des Merveilles" and it runs from Nice Ville to Tende. Train of Marvels So how do we get there? My plan is to leave early on Sunday and head south on the motorways as far as Nuits-St-Georges. This will be the longest day to kill off miles in Northern France. Next stop Annecy. It's not a long day and I have set the routes from here to be "no tolls". I don't see the point in spending all day on the road and arriving with no time to see anything. The no tolls route takes us along Lac Annecy and then down to Albertville, then alongside the A43 to Modane.  From there you can take the  Fréjus Tunnel  or take the D1006 over the first pass of the trip over the  Col du Mont Cenis  at 2083m. This route joins the same route at Susa that would have come through the Fréjus Tunnel. From there it is into Italy. The route loops down and around Turin ending in Cuneo. I have booked an overnight here. This is the f...

The ideas are still bubbling away.  With an Old SOCs weekend planned in the English Lake District for the middle of August this trip needs to be done from late July. I had the idea of fulfilling one of my bucket list points and heading for Poland.  Auschwitz has been a pilgrimage for me for many years and I have never made it. Once in the 90's when I worked in Zastávka u Brna I did get as far as the Czech/Polish border at  Český Těšín  and got no further. The bridge over the river was closed to traffic although I did walk across to the halfway point to say I had stepped foot in Poland. I have no idea whether this was just that day or (semi) permanent. I watched Richard Ayoade's " Travel Man - 48 hours in Krakow " recently and the lure of a salt mine was almost too great.  But the lure of a scenic railway tops that! The railway in question is Train des Merveilles and runs between Nice and Tende.  It w...

I had hoped that Claire would have felt able to go on the bike.   I looked in October at the long ferry to Spain when Brittany Ferries released the prices and the booking system opened for the summer.  In the end that didn't go any further. We toyed with a cruise but none met with where we wanted to go or the dates didn't quite fit when I can go. So. No cruise. No bike trip.  Some while back when I was hoping for a bike trip I had a look at visiting the eastern part of France - the Vercors. I scrapped that and deleted all the routes I had worked out.  Until I started going on trips with my brother where he plans to the Nth degree, including prospective fuel stops.   I haven't been that exact.  My level of planning was to choose a place, what to do/see and where to stay to achieve that. A chance email from Claire and a French contact from work about Evian les Bains has given me food f...