Going Postal

The last couple of weeks has been really, really, busy. Our fearless leader has been giving us one urgent (?) job on top of another with tight deadlines to go with it and yours truly has been putting in the big hours trying to plough through it all!

After several weeks doing that I reckoned it was time to chill out before I reached my 'going postal' point and started ruminating on the relative merits of putting TNT vs. Nitro in the office coffee machine...

So I took a days annual leave on Friday to have a three day weekend and drive the couple of hours across to Lyon, the second largest city in France and home to amongst other things, several schools of fine cuisine, the silk trade, the home of the Lumiere brothers (inventors of the movie camera) and museum.

htttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re

It was a nice time of year with unseasonably early spring-like weather. Lots of nice restaurants to eat delicious food (just dine where the locals do and avoid the tourist places with production-line meals on the main drags).

It also has lots of beautiful boutiques and huge sports shops since it is many times larger than the town where I live. They have one chain called 'The Old Camper' which has separate dedicated shops -one just for scuba, one just for mountaineering, one just for hiking and climbing boots, etc., etc. Awesome.

I managed to get some outdoor gear at a serious end of season discount. I bought a great North Face thermal jacket to go inside my Goretex shell (after my chilly weekend in the Jura) at a really good price as well as some Swedish hiking trousers by Fjall Raven (Snow Fox in Swedish).

http://www.thenorthface.com/opencms/opencms/tnf/gear.jsp?site=NA&model=AA85&language=en

http://www.fjallraven.org/Products/Product.asp?ItemId=101&SectionName=yes&Menu=menu1&SectionId=3785

On Sunday I went up to the Fourviere cathedral on the top of the hill and from there you have a stunning view all the way to the Alps on a clear day.

Lots of cobblestoned streets, laid back people (tourist season and the inevitable coach loads of visitors are still a few months away), charming buildings and walks along the river in the old town. Wonderful.

Back to work on Monday and feeling very Zen again...

With apologies and all due respect to his Holiness the Dalai Lama