Oct 30, Arrival in France

I've travelled to France to take two months of French classes. The first month is in the small village of Villegailhenc and in December I'm in Toulouse.

I eased into speaking French by visiting with a couple of friends in the Toulouse area, both of whom I work with at Xilinx. Nick Sawyer has been at Xilinx for over twenty years and is married to Brigitte, a native French woman. Mark Quartermain, like Nick,is originally from England but fell in love with a French woman, Marie, and now makes the Toulouse area his home.

France Info

Oct 8 - 12, High Sierras

Jamie and her brother John had a trip planned to the Sierra Nevada Mountains as a reward for Jamie completing her MBA thesis. I was fortunate to accompany them and joined in a couple of Mountain ascents (Mt Conness and Mt Dana). The weather turned bad while we were on Mt Dana and Jamie and I descended when only 200 feet shy of the summit. Time proved we made the correct decision. We got back to camp and started packing amidst light snow flurries. By the time we were headed down to lower elevations, it started snowing in earnest.

Mt Conness & Mt Dana

The first real snowstorm of the year caught most folks by surprise and ended up closing all the major mountain passes south of hiway #50.