After a week of waking up at 4am, 5am, and 6am and going to bed at 8pm, 9pm, and 10pm, you’d think we would have spent our first weekend back from France just chilling. Nope. After work on Friday we picked up a Zipcar and started heading east. We made it to Groveland, about 140 miles west of San Francisco before stopping at a cheap motel for the night.

We got going early the next morning, on our way towards Mono Lake through Yosemite. Previously we’d entered the park from the south to visit Yosemite Valley, and from the west to go snowshoeing near Badger Pass, but we’d never driven across Yosemite through the Tioga Pass, California’s highest road at 9,945′ above sea level.

Though Mono Lake was our intended destination, it was impossible not to stop along the way in Yosemite. The weather was just perfect, in the high 80s, and the skies were absolutely clear. We saw Half Dome from Olmsted Point, the stunning Tenaya Lake, and of course the Tioga Pass. We made it to Mono Lake around lunchtime, so we stopped in at Bodie Mike’s BBQ in Lee Vining before heading out to explore further.

Note: I’m experimenting with adding larger versions of the photos on my blog. Each of the 380px wide images in this post links to an 800px wide version. If you’re viewing this post on my blog directly (as opposed to in a feedreader) clicking on the image should display the larger version with a sexy animated transition. Please let me know what you think.

Update: As of my Responsive Redesign in May 2015, I’m displaying the large version of photos in my posts, so I’ve removed the ability to click on the photo to enlarge it, which no longer had any purpose—and wasn’t very effective on touchscreen devices.

Friday it rained. We took it easy. Ran a few errands. Packed. Had one last dinner with Aurelie, Michel, and Luna. Went to bed after midnight and woke up at 5am to catch our 7:30 flight from Nice to London.

Highlight of the trip home was breakfast at Huxley’s Bar and Kitchen in Heathrow. I had the “Great British Breakfast”: bacon, sausage, eggs, tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, hash brown, and toast.

Also fun was riding the longest escalator in Heathrow:

It’s probably hard to believe that with two weeks in France, we don’t really have much “free” time to go off on our own to explore. We’d done more of that during our previous trips, but too often it felt like we were shortchanging the family time and exhausting ourselves in the process. And with Stephanie’s dad now living in France, about 4 hours from Nice, the number of family members to visit had doubled.

So on this trip we made a conscious decision not to plan to do anything by ourselves. We were just going to go with the flow. Spend time with family. Enjoy meals together. Run some errands. By and large it was really nice. We spent good time with everyone, we never felt rushed, and we returned home feeling pretty relaxed.

That said, on the Thursday before we left, after we’d satisfied every possible familial obligation, there was a break in the rain, so we decided we were ready for some time alone. So we headed up into the mountains behind Cannes to a tiny town called Gourdon, perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Gorges-du-Loup.

We had a nice long lunch at a humorously named restaurant, La Fringale du Petit Indien (the hunger of the little Indian). Our table had its own window looking out across the gorges all the way to Nice and the Mediterranean Sea. Afterwards we walked around the tiny town, did a little shopping, and took in the expansive views.

On Wednesday, we continued the tradition of making a pilgrimage to Fayence to visit Stephanie’s grandmother. Over a glass of champagne, we took photos of old photos while she told us stories about her family’s history.

I’m not sure when I first stumbled upon Christopher Ames’ photoblog, this is my eye, but the fact that he takes pictures in and around Antibes and captions them in English definitely caught my eye. After visiting Le Marché Provençal in Antibes last week I left a comment on his blog that I was “in his hood”, and shortly thereafter got an email in my inbox with the subject “Beer!”. How could I resist?

So on Monday night, not more than an hour after getting back from the Îles de Lérins, Stephanie and I met up with him and his wife Gunes at a bar called La Terrasse in Antibes. As it happens, güneş, pronounced goo-NESH, is the Turkish word for soleil, Stephanie’s last name. Coincidence? I think not.

Once it was confirmed that there were no psycho-killers among us, they took us to an Italian restaurant a few blocks away that specialized in a unique preparation of focaccia. Not surprisingly the topic of home cheesemaking came up, which we described with unusual passion. Chris summed the whole thing up thusly:

This is the very lovely Mr and Mrs Justinsomnia who we met for the first time this evening. Y’know sometimes you just have to do funny things, like meet up with cheese-mad bloggers from California…