Villard de Lans, you rock!

I am back in France after a 2 day nightmarish drive from Sweden to Grenoble. Not only did it rain most of the way but Germany has decided to repair its Autobahn.  Normally it is THE way to get from Scandinavia down to the south of Europe relatively quickly but not this time. Instead of driving 130 km an hour it was limited to 80 km an hour most of the way. And did I mention the rain? It was truly a dreadful trip. The other thing is that I get so sleepy so I had quite a few power naps on the way as well and that also slows you down.

I stopped off in two different place, Lübeck in the north of German, which is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site and producer of marzipan, yum! They also had lots of amazing bridges. I am sure hubby would be delighted to have a little stop there another time.

I also spent the night in Ettingheim, a very cute baroque town with lovely old buildings. Both those places are well worth a visit but I was a bit limited for time.

This beer was true nectar when I arrived in Ettingheim, just a shame about the food. I guess after living almost 30 years in France you are a bit spoiled and the German cuisine can be a bit stodgy (sorry German readers.)

The title of this blog is 'Villard de Lans, you rock!', and there are several reasons for this. It has lots of things on, and today they had a special market on so we did a bit of shopping, of course. My friends have fairly recently moved up here from Grenoble and since this is my first trip back to France since we moved to Australia I had not seen their house nor did I really know Villard de Lans. 

The other reason for mentioning a rock is that their house has a huge rock in front of it in their garden.

So standing on their balcony looking out this is what you see:

However, walking around the village you have lots of opportunity to see beautiful views of the Vercors.

The rock is a real feature, and it is classified, so they can't remove it, even if they wanted to, which they don't.