Trempe Jusqu'aux Os....

Every vacation, I think, has its odd day or two, and today was one of ours. The weather forecast this morning was for thundershowers, which made us change our original plan (to drive to Annecy) and go into Grenoble instead. Our thinking was that if it were to rain, there would still be things to do inside, and we wouldn't get wet.

So still a bit jet-lagged (me feeling it especially), we drove down to Grenoble. The first task was parking. Several unfortunate turns and we found ourselves in the center of the city, on narrow, narrow streets, surrounded by pedestrians and other vehicles. Giving up on free parking, we spotted a garage and headed for the entrance. Unfortunately our car (a small, four-wheel drive vehicle made by Renault called a Kangoo, very functional and very French-looking and fun to drive -- the manual transmission taking me back to my younger days) is very tall, over 2 meters, and the entrance to the parking garage was very small, not much more than 2 meters, so we got right to the entrance gate, decided we shouldn't chance going in, and had to back into traffic. The driver is now stressing and saying mild swear words in a forceful manner, while his wife is remining him that he is on vacation in France. But a further five minutes and we found another lot, this one with spacious high ceilings (and, it should be noted, very clean and shiny concrete floors).

We had a map, but didn't follow it, and walked to and through a neighborhood of what looked to be lower-income appartments. A few blocks and we turned up a more commercial, but still fairly low-traffic, street. On this street there was a coiffeur, and because my oldest son Will had wanted a haircut before we left, and because the price was right, we stopped in and he got one. Meanwhile, Andrew and I scouted about, and found the beginning of the nice, main shopping and restaurant area. We wandered about indecisive about where to have lunch, choosing finally a place on the Plaza de Notre Dame, in the center of which stood an interesting fountain with wild bat-gargoyles spewing water:

The food was OK, not great, but we felt better after lunch and walked around the old center of the city, the main portion of which is a pedestrians-only zone. The boys were lobbying to ride the telepherique up to the Bastille, the telepherique being something akin to a gondola, and the Bastille being a fort high above Grenoble on the other side of the River Isere. We managed to put the boys off for a while by getting them ice cream, and we found a nice bookstore to browse in awhile. Then we headed for the Gare de Telepherique.

On our way, we passed through a nice park with a lovely garden (which we viewed while a rock bank loudly warmed up for an evening concert, so add that aural image to this visual one).

Immediately past this garden was the telepherique. It consists of two sets of four clear round balls hanging down from a cable strung from the terminal up to the Bastille. Each of the balls seats 6 people, and the four of us had one all to ourselves. The ride up was not a scary as it seems it would be; even Suzie, who has a fear of heights, did OK.

Once we arrived at the top, we noticed that the clouds, which had been building over the past hour, were now thicker and blacker, as this picture (dramatic, if I do say so) shows.

Although you did not need to be a weatherman to see that a storm was moving in (apologies to Bob Dylan), we figured that, like the day before, any shower would probably pass through quickly and be brief. So off we went. Andrew had seen come caves on the way up, so we headed toward them. It was very cool inside, a relief from the humidity, and here are me and the boys standing outside one of them.

About this time rain started lightly falling, and we decided that we had better head back to the car. We had ridden the telepherique up, but planned to hike down, which takes about 45 minutes. Various photos taken during our descent follow. (I should add here that the fortress, the Bastille, is very impressive, if only for its immensity. It consists of very, very high walls covering an enormous amount of ground, perched on – and on the face of – a severely steep hill. It is one of those things that makes you ask how it could possibly have been built, particularly when it was, in the 19th century. Also, we never figured out who it was protecting Grenoble from. Presumably the Germans, but maybe the Italians, too.)

After about 20 minutes, our luck ran out. To that point, the rain had been intermittent and light. But then the storm blew in with full force. The rain became heavy, forcing is to stand beneath a steep rock outcropping to try to keep dry. Meanwhile the lightning and thunder became intense; at one point it struck right about ¼ mile away, a bright flash followed by a tremendous crack. The boys were lobbying for heading back uphill to a cave we had gone through on the way down, but Suzie and I told them not to worry, the storm would blow over soon.

This is why children don’t end up believing their parents much. To our dismay, the storm did not let up, it intensified, the raindrops becoming bigger, heavier, more frequent, the sky blacker, the thunder and lightning continuing. As the vegetation above us became saturated, and the wind picked up, our location was of less and less assistance to us, and we became more and more soaked the longer the storm went on. Once we saw the sky begin to lighten, and we said, ‘ah, this is the end,’ but right then the rain put on an extra spurt of strength, as if saying, ‘ah, not so.’ It did, of course, finally let up, relatively speaking, turning into a moderate to light rain, at which point we continued down, now wet and cold, our shoes soaked, our shirts soaked, following the rivers of muddy water also draining down the trail. I was never so happy to get back to a parking garage, to have the deluge on me cease, to turn on the heater, to be dry in traffic, and heading home.