Twenty five years ago I was amazed that writing merely “Le Travers,Sablieres,France” on an envelop did the job. Today I’m even more surprised that typing just “Le Travers,Sablieres” into Google Maps or Google earth brings you there in seconds with an offset of about 100 meters!
Actually, the Google mark may be more accurate as it depicts the spot on an old mule-path entering ‘le hameau de travers’ which consists of two main buildings : ‘le by’ just below us and what we call ‘the travers’ but locals prefer to call ‘le jarlier’ or ‘garlelier’ or whathever (no consistent spelling for the house-name yet). If you are French and know the correct spelling, please leave a comment (it may have to do something with making baskets and/or pottery).
I’ve always thought the building dated from the late 18th century, but now they tell me part of it may actually be a lot older. How they decide this is pretty funny : around the buildings is a regular grid of old chestnut trees and as most of them are around 400 years old, so must be the core-building, which was extended over time to accomodate the growing number of people and animals, until some 100 yrs ago when the place was deserted and became ruins…
The first few days biking conditions were excellent. If you ever come to visit or will be in the neighborhood and are in for an easy (resp. demanding, resp. tough) one and a half hour ride here, are some suggestions.
Start/end point is always the end of the loose green path in the middle (le travers). An easy but quite nice route to get a feel for the surroundings is the yellowish loop (gooing back over blue/green) from Sablieres to Orcieres and gooing back along camping La Drobie. Slighly more demanding is the blue climb to over 900 meters to Peyre (and back). By far the nicest (but also hardest) small tour is the green one (Dompnac-Pourcharesse-St.Melany). If you want to study these routes in more detail using GoogleEarth here is the kmz-file. Btw. this file was obtained from my GPS gpx-file using GPS-visualizer. Two and a half years ago I managed to connect the place via a slow dial-up line and conjectured that broadband-internet would never come this far. I may have to reconsider that now as the village got an offer from Numeo.fr to set-up a wireless (??!!) broadband-network with a pretty low subscription… But, as no cell-phone provider has yet managed to cover this area, I’m a bit doubtful about Numeo’s bizness-plan. Still, it would be great. Now, all I have to do is to convince the university-administration that my online teaching is a lot better than my in-class-act and Ill be taking up residence here pretty soon…
google, teaching
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Posted in egotism
Written on Mon, 16 April 2007 at 10:16 am
Tags: google, teaching
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