Chartres Light Show on the Cathedral and Beyond

This fall, we went down to Chartres (only an hour or so from Paris, without traffic at least) to see the light show that runs most nights from spring to fall.  The show consists of moving images exactly fit to the outlines of the cathedral and other structures around town.  They custom-engineered projectors and imagery to fit each exact site of the projections.  It's impressive to see.

The photos below are photos of the buildings at night, during the show.

They do still projections, but the projections are also animated.  Sometimes they have little people climbing up the walls, or a whole field of stars gliding across the face of the cathedral,  This looks more like a drawing, but it's a photo.

They have a series of images and animations they show on various sides of the buildings.  This is on one side of the Cathedral.

This is another church in Chartres.

Beach Fireworks in San Sebastian Spain

At the end of our summer vacation, we ended up in San Sebastian, a fun beach town on the northern coast of Spain, about an hour from the border with France.  They've got two really big, excellent, sandy beaches.  The bigger beach reminded me of Nice, with a promenade full of people walking and biking all along the seawall overlooking the beach.

By sheer dumb luck, we ended up there for the biggest event of the year; a fireworks contest with a show every night for a week.  Each day, we went down to the beach, then back to the hotel for a quick shower, took the bus to the pedestrian area full of walk-up tapas bars for dinner, and finally, back to the beach for the fireworks.  Here's how the beach looked every night just before the fireworks.

We set up down on the beach to take photos. You can see the vague outlines of people standing on the beach at lower right in this one.

Most of the fireworks were not so high in the sky, but some then shot way above where I had framed the photo.  You can see some coming down from above in this one.  Why is that one lady looking sideways and taking a photo?  They had fireworks sent up from a barge in the bay also. 

Some of these were taken hand-held with our small camera.  In order to hand-hold, I had to up the ISO, which means a lot more noise in the photos. 

Other photos were taken with the big camera on a tripod, and have noticeably less colorful speckles of noise.  The next two are examples of that.  On a small screen, it may not be noticeable, but I like to look at them on as big a screen as possible.

At bottom of the above photo, I noticed people doing something I'd never thought of.   Here's an enlargement where you can see them, swimming in the ocean at night while watching fireworks.  Those crazy kids!

San Sebastian is also only an hour away from Bilbao.  One rainy day, we took the opportunity to go visit Frank Gehry's architectural blockbuster museum in Bilbao.  Jennifer got this one when we walked up onto the nearby bridge to get a better view.

Here's my psychedelic geometric abstraction of the museum building.

All of the was at the end of a trip with lots of other great photos, but more nature-related.  Here's a link to the photos from the Ordesa Hike in the Spanish Pyrenees. 

The Ordesa Hike in the Spanish Pyrenees

After hiking in and around the Cirque de Gavarnie in the French Pyrenees, we drove to Torla in the Spanish Pyrenees.  Torla is the town just outside the Ordesa and Monte Perdido national park.  The guide books say this is the hike to do if you've only got time for one.  It didn't disappoint.

Private cars aren't allowed into the park.  Instead, there's a big parking lot in Torla, and a continuous stream of buses taking visitors in.  The total number of visitors per day is limited, so it's recommended to arrive before 9:30 AM.

We really loved this series of cascading waterfalls.  At first, Jennifer thought this straight-edged dropoff was somehow artificial, but it was just the angular character of the rock in this part of the mountains.

We hiked into the Ordesa valley via the lower trail. This is a view looking back the way we came in.

I thought it would be fun to throw this photo in, something we saw on our drive from Gavarnie, across the Pyrenees, and into Torla.  Grazing rights are a major subject of the law in these mountainous borderlands.  We saw cows grazing on many mountain roads, sometimes supervised, and sometimes not.

As you can see in the first waterfalls photo above, there are several pools, one flowing into another.  This photo is taken a short way further up the trail, looking at the pools above these lower ones.  Of course, it takes a tripod to get the flowing water to look like this.

After passing all those waterfalls, we came into the wide-open central valley of Ordesa.  Note the hikers on the trail down the center of the valley.

Soon after coming into the open, we ran across a beautiful pool and stream.  We stopped and had our lunch there.  I made sure there were no people in this one.  We had fantastic sausage sandwiches from the hotel.  Some local type of sausage and green peppers on fresh bread.  I wish we could get those any time we wanted them!

After visiting the falls at the head of the valley, we decided to take the upper trail on the way back.  This is the view back to the head of the valley as we ascend to the high ridge on one side of the valley.

What we thought was a minor detour onto this ridge-line trail turned out to be a gradual, non-stop climb for an hour.  I was getting annoyed at the unexpectedly long climb, and worrying about the necessarily long descent to match, but the resulting views of the canyon were more than worth the effort.  By this time, we'd ascended far enough to have views like this of the opposite side of the valley.

We loved how there were trees at the top, then burnt orange vertical rock walls too steep for anything to cling to, followed by a step in the valley side, where more fir trees were growing in sparse groups.  The day was partly cloudy, so the shadows of the clouds were crawling up and down the mountains all around us as we hiked.  At this point, it was nearly all shade.

Another reason to take the ridge-line trail is that very few people choose to go this obviously more difficult way.  So, though there was a pretty continuous stream of hikers down below, we were alone on the trail much of the time way up here.

This is a view of the desolate gray and orange peak of Monte Perdido, towering over the valley far in the back.  Monte Perdido is the other namesake of this national park.

Looking up the valley, toward where we were heading. The sun visited us for this one.  It was nice out that day, not too hot, not too cold.  We had a couple of brief rain showers in the morning, then just a lot of passing clouds.

As promised in the guide book, once we got near the entrance, this trail turned into a 2000-foot steep descent of non-stop switchbacks.  We ran across a couple going very slowly on the way down,  The woman was wearing that type of shoe that is nothing but a cushioned leather sole and a leather strap across the top of the front of your foot.  Obviously, they'd never done much hiking.  But, they seemed to be OK.  When I asked if they were OK, they said, "Si, poco a poco", i.e, little by little.

This is the view on the way out of the park.

A half-hour later, we made it down to the rendezvous point and caught the short bus ride back to town, along with a crowd of other hikers.  And so, we said adios to Ordesa.

This is one of a series of articles about our travels across southern France and into Spain last August.  The others have great photos and inside info on what it's like to visit a bunch of great destinations along the way.

Part 1 River and valley photos from the Martel hike in the Gorge de Verdon.

Part 2 Kayaking the Gorge de Verdon, and hike the Styx trail.

Part 3 A drive from the Gorge de Verdon in the southeast of France to the Pyrenees in the southwest of France, withe sunflower fields, the famous Tour de France mountain pass called Col du Tourmalet, and waterfalls.

Part 4 Hiking from France into Spain via "La Breche de Roland."

Part 5 Hiking to the incredible waterfall of the Cirque de Gavarnie

Cirque de Gavarnie: Spectacular Hiking in the French Pyrenees

After our hike to "La Breche de Roland" , we decided to do probably the most famous hike in the Pyrenees, the Cirque du Gavarnie, which is a valley with vertical rock walls over a four thousand feet high closing off one end, not to mention a 1500 foot high waterfall visible from many miles away.  We had an view of the waterfall from the window in our room.  It was great to watch bands of clouds form, and drift across the valley as the sun set each evening.

The waterfall looks amazing.  We watched it for hours, from all around the valley.  So, fair warning, the pictures are pretty much all waterfalls, all the time.  This is an extended exposure taken from the base of the waterfall.

We got going early enough to beat the hordes of ponies carrying tourists up the trail every day.  That's important, if you'd rather not spend most of the hike dodging manure. Fortunately, ponies aren't allowed past the two-thirds mark of the trail, where it turns more rocky, steep, and gravelly.  Just before the pony cutoff point, we passed this.

Another extended exposure from a similar angle.

After being practically in the waterfall, we wandered off to other parts nearby.  We found ourselves a sunny, quiet spot, far from the crowd, and rested on a boulder.  The waterfall mesmerized us while we ate bread, cheese, and sausage for lunch.  By this time, the sun had nearly reached the waterfall, but not quite.  I was determined to stick around until the sun lit it up.

After we finished lunch and started to wander around the area, we surprised, and were surprised by, a couple of sheep who'd been sleeping under a nearby rock.  They begrudgingly got up and ambled away, snacking on weeds growing between the rocks along the way.

The water fall had two main parts, above and below this ledge.  It would be really cool to go up on that ledge!

It's always tough to get an idea of scale in big nature photos.  Take a look at the next three to get a better sense of it.

See highlighted inset at lower left, then see the crop (not blown up - just cropped).

This is the same photo above, cropped to just that area.  That should help give you some idea of scale for the rest of the photos.

Finally, the sun reached the falls.  At this point, the water is just starting to catch the rays, while most of the rock face is still in shade.

The sunlight highlights the spray drifting on the wind.

The sunlight comes in from the right and just grazes the water and the rocks to the left, while the right side is still in shade.  

Sorry, can't resist another closeup.

This looks like an entire waterfall, but it's really only the top half.  The dark clouds and rocky, inaccessible heights lend it a bit of a menacing mood.  

Yes, all these photographs are of the same falls, but I was nowhere near tired of photographing them.  We really did linger in the valley for a few hours, even though we could have turned around and headed back as soon as we arrived. I'd like to photograph these falls at all times of day, in every season.  Maybe we'll come back here some day.

This is the fifth in a series on our southern France summer vacation.

Part 1 River and valley photos from the Martel hike in the Gorge de Verdon.

Part 2 Kayaking the Gorge de Verdon, and hiking the Styx trail.

Part 3 Driving from the Gorge de Verdon in the southeast of France to the Pyrenees in the southwest of Francesee sunflower fields, the famous Tour de France mountain pass called Col du Tourmalet, and waterfalls.

Part 4 Hiking from France right into Spain via "La Breche de Roland."

Part 6 Spanish Pyrenees Mountains and Waterfalls Hike