Le-Puy-En-Velay

Hangin out in a small city (20000 in town, 50000 surrounding, in the mountains called Le Puy-En-Velay (Le-Puy for short). We're staying with my aunt and uncle Helene and Michel who are Alexandre's parents. Sally, Alexandre and I all have colds. First time in at least 3 years that I've had a cold and it comes now! Typical. Anyhow at least we're here and not paying for a hotel to be miserable in... No new pictures for now. We're on dial up so it'll take too long.
Le-Puy is much older than Toulouse. It has a long religious history and has some stunning catherdrals and churches as well as a couple statues of "La Vierge Noire" the Black Virgin) and some Saint who's name I can't remember. We climbed up to the biggest Cathedral, it was pretty wild architecture even if millions had to die and suffer through eons of oppression to build it. Also, I didn't catch fire as I walked through it. Sally considered confession, but the church couldn't put us up for that long... There was a bunch of people praying there, as the news of the new conservative Pope had just been announced. I'll leave my "prayer" up to your imagination ;)
All in all a beautiful city. I should mention the statues and the Cathedrals are build on top of extremely steep hills that tower above the city. At night the statues are lit up making for a unique view. Pretty neat..
We're lucky to have family here as it's really not a tourist town, and not too many people would find this place, being out of the way.
Okay I lied, I decided to upload one pic just to appease the folks. This one was taken from up top where the Viere Noire is standing with little baby Jebus.
Okay I lied a little. I've been uploading one picture while typing and I just ate dinner so the upload is done.
It's a shot from the base of the Vierge Noire of part of Le Puy-En-Velay. If I had my tripod I would have taken a 360° panoramic, but c'est la vie... When I get to another high speed connection I'll upload the rest. There's some goodies :) Going drinkin' so Sally's tugging on my arm to leave...

Finalement j'ai les photos en ligne!

More Photos!
So after literally hours of uploading I've got all the pics of the trip so far on the net. Here is a link to get to the main travel page: http://ranamok.smugmug.com/Travel
I've added a few pics from England (we were only there overnight), the airport in Vancouver, France, more Portugal, and photos of Spain as we passed through.
Please keep in mind that I haven't touched up anything and that I haven't culled the bad ones either.


France and England respectively.

So we went to Tonton's last night. It was happy hour when we got there so we bought a bunch of beer and Pastisse - a licorice like drinkm and proceeded to turn the bar upside down (the pics are up... they start here. Sally was the hit of the party. I was looking for a stick to chase off all the french guys hitting on her. It didn't help that she was using the Canada map on her chest to show them where we were from... We had a great time, there were two stags (hence this guy and we were in the center :) What a night. Relaxed again today. We'll probably go to the Space museum tomorrow. Toulouse is the Aerospace hub of France. They make all the rockets and satelites here as well as Airbus planes. We've seen some neat planes flying overhead designed for carrying planes!

Vive la France!

Well, we're in France now.
Due to an extremly frustrating and exhausting experience over the last couple days, we decided to skip Spain and head right to France. The long an short of it is that we missed a key bus for Barcelona and ended up traveling for 26 hours on buses and trains with no real sleep for 36 hours. Yeah, not the highlight of the trip so far. We decided for our sanity to hit Toulouse and visit my cousin Alexandre so we could relax a bit and save some cash. We'll head back to Spain sometime later. We have no shedule so it's not a big deal, we were just pissed about being poorly treated and ripped off, plus neither of us could think straight anymore.
Anyway, I don't want to dwell on bad experiences. Toulouse is beatiful. Alexandre's a great host and it's great to be in country where we know the language. In Spain everyone we asked would say they didn't know French or English, even though it was obvious they did. That really pissed me off. Here they just smile at my accent and either help or switch to English because bad French is worse than English to many French people :o)
Alexandre's on a VPN through his school so I only get a slight reprieve from Internet cafe madness, but it's still worlds better. Also he's let me change the keyboard so the letters are in the right place again and I can type properly.
Due to the VPN restrictions I have to upload ONE picture at a timem so please look at then if I'm spending this much time on them!
By the way in reponse to a couple comments - you need to click on the picture to get to the rest of them. It would take ages to load this site if I posted them all here...
We're spending today relaxing at the apartement. We'll probably hit the bar tonight for some well deserved drinks.

Finally some pictures!

I´m sorry I only have 4 for now, but it takes time to upload and time is money. I finally found a place that won't gouge me completely here in Lisbon, too bad we're leaving in a couple hours! I'll get more in soon, just wanted to give you a taste...

Stupid f$#"%"ing internet cafes

Ok.
1. Iºm buying a laptop.
2. I hate internet cafes with their limited access to sites, poor customer service and stupid keyboards.
3. I hate Internet Explorer and pop-ups. I should get a discount for having to use this piece of crap program.
4. I canºt check my Gmail account because it needs activeX and this cafe wonºt let me turn it on, and I still have to pay.
5. Sally canºt check hotmail, and she still needs to pay.
6. Still havent found a way to take care of my pictures without getting ripped off. (They wonºt even provide vaseline).

We're here!

Ok, so this is about 5 days late, but we made it... We just spent 3 days in the Algarve of Portugal in Queitera near Faro. Nice and hot, and clean beaches. We came during a lull in the season I guess as there was hardly any one there. We decided that even though it was beutiful and hot, to cut our stay short as there was a lack of social interaction with anyone under 60. We were too jet lagged or sun-tired to go out for the supposed nightlife that our cabbie told us about.
Sorry about the lack of photos, itºs a pain in the ass here as I canºt get anyone to let me upload my pics. On top of that, the photo processing places want to charge about $6 or $7 per 100 photos burnt to CD. That means it would cost me $40 or so to empty my cards. um Rip off! So Iºmº thinking I may have to buy a laptop or PDA instead. I was gonna wait until Thailand or Japan to do that though. I dunno, kind of a drag. Ill find a way to post photos as soon as I can. Ive got some great ones. Pleas excuse the poor punctuation, I canºt figure the keyboard out and the language option has been disabled. Hopefully once I get to France Ill have some real PC access and then I can fix everything up. Stay tuned... We arrived in Lisbon today by bus. We decided to make life interesting by not having a hotel booked, so when we got here we had no idea where to go or what to do. After about 3 hours we found ourselves downtown in the Baixa district with a hotel and an interesting Metro experience... Its stunning here. The architecture is amazing and its everywhere. Tons of squares with statues and lots of pedestrian only roads. We could spend weeks walking around downtown alone! Probably going to head for Madrid on Wednesday instead though. Anyway, when Im not limited by time or cahs, Ill write again properly. Overall having a great time, if not a little stressed...

The Big Day

Well, getting on the plane today at 4. Not nervous yet for some reason. Starting to get excited though. Anyway, gotta leave fot the airport. Hope the laws of physics hold up...