France

We are leaving Grenoble tomorrow, after spending 2 months here. Up next, we’re heading to the mountains to hike the Pyrenees High Route, which runs the length of the French-Spanish border. It should take us somewhere in the ballpark of 40 days. Before we leave, I wanted to reflect a bit on our time here. When we arrived in Grenoble, we had been traveling non-stop for over a year. To date, our style of travel left us quite exhausted, and in search of something more like a home base. When we started traveling in February 2025, we started with New Zealand, where we drove and hiked all over the south island for a month. After a brief stopover to see some friends in Australia, we flew up to Vietnam, bounced around southeast Asia, and found ourselves in Nepal in April. We spent a month in Nepal, hiking, before returning to the U.S. via Indonesia. We then prepared to hike the Pacific Crest Trail by hiking the Sunshine Coast Trail, in B.C., Canada, over the course of a week. We then hiked the PCT for 4 months and ended that with a friends and family tour before heading to Baja, Mexico with some friends for Christmas and New Years. After Mexico, we spent 2 months in Patagonia, driving around and hiking, largely living out of backpacks and the back of a rental car. And from Patagonia, we took a bit of time off with family before we spent a month hiking the Appalachian Trail. Not long after our time on the AT, we arrived in Grenoble, France. We arrived pretty tired. ...

The other week we took a trip down to the French Riviera. I think technically the French Riviera is a subset of the Mediterranean coastline of France, so maybe it’s easier to just say we went to the sea. We rented a car for 4 days from the Grenoble city center. We made the trip for a few reasons. First, it was insanely hot here in Grenoble. Here is one of a dozen articles from the NY Times, detailing the heatwave. To simplify the heatwave I would say temperatures were regularly 25 degrees above average (F), the French do not have air conditioning and are somewhat culturally against it, and the surfaces in cities (sidewalks, buildings) absorb the heat and radiate it well into the night. It was pretty unbearable. ...

Yesterday we decided to visit Annecy, a nearby town with a lake. It’s about 1.5 hours away by bus, which goes from city center to city center. We left Grenoble at 8:30 and came back around 20:30. We have been in Grenoble for about 6 weeks now. At first we had a bunch of excitement and enthusiasm to see many different things. As we explored more, the weather got hotter and we settled into more of our normal routines: exercise, eat, do some planning or personal project work, and sleep. I can pretty well trace our first lull in activity to our first heatwave here in Grenoble. It was too hot to want to exercise outside. It was then that I began to notice in order to exercise away from the bustle of people and cars and radiative sources of heat, I needed to run at least two miles towards the edge of town, through busy city streets. We also realized, visually, that despite there being a river through Grenoble, it’s not used for recreation. It’s way too fast moving and dirty. So we were looking forward to Annecy which should be a smaller, quieter town with direct access to a usable water feature. ...

We learned about the Tour a day before it was scheduled to start. Our background and interest in professional cycling isn’t too complex. After watching the 3 seasons of Tour de France Unchained, we were sufficiently interested in spectating. Those crowds are insane! The vibes would be off the charts. I don’t even own a bike. Although if you ask my mom, one in her garage is mine. I’ll take it some day. ...

We decided to come to France for up to a year! As U.S. citizens, we are allowed to stay in most of Europe for up to 90 days at a time in any 180 day period. We wanted to spend more than a summer in Europe so we needed to figure out how we could get around this restriction. We didn’t want to have to spend time outside of Europe to “reset” these days and so we explored the various visa options available to us. France has a visitor visa, VLS-T[S] that you can get for up to a year by essentially paying fees, showing you have sufficient funds to support yourself while you are here, and promising to not work. If you are wondering what sufficient funds are, I think it’s something like French minimum wage, so something like €23,000/person/year. ...