St Hugues de Chartreuse et musée d'art sacré contemporain
Months ago Eduard and I set ourselves the goal to go out for walks or hikes as often as we could, and at least once every weekend. Although it’s definitely no burden to go out for a walk and enjoy nature, the wish sometimes just gets lost in all the chores you plan to do during weekends. Expressing this goal and working towards it as if it’s part of the to-do list during the weekend, made it much easier to follow up on this wish. With a few exceptions, we have enjoyed the low Alps and it’s nature every weekend. It has become a happy routine, almost like a necessity.
Discovering a new (living) environment
In the beginning, when we just arrived here, and maybe even the whole first year, we thought that there were no easy walks or hikes in our region. Every hike that we would find would be at least 5 hours and 800m denivelée. Not exactly what you want to do – every week – as a beginner. As we entered our third year of living on the foot of the Alps, we’ve found our way in discovering different kind of walks and hikes in many different varieties. I find most of my information on other blogs or on Instagram for example. Whenever I see a beautiful picture, I try to find out where it was made and if it’s possible for us to reach that spot. That way we have discovered many new accessible walks and hikes. Randonnées like this one below at Saint Hugues de Chartreuse.
St Hugues de Chartreuse
The hike took somewhere in between one hour to one-and-a-half hour and it had barely any denivelée. I think they say that it’s about 150m. There are also many different walks you can do from the starting point at St Hugues de Chartreuse, all marked by the well known yellow signs. We took a non-direct way to Les Egaux and back.
The tricky thing about this walk is not it’s length or it’s climb as I mentioned above, but the fact that you have to cross different meadows owned by different people. Meaning that you have to climb over hedges or crawl under wires that are bordering those meadows. That is basically the only adventurous thing of this walk. Everything else is just pure enjoyment. The whole walk was quiet. We didn’t encounter any other people. We only saw sheep, cows, squirrels, dogs and many birds. The air was so fresh that we could literally eat it. Very enjoyable!
Musée d’art sacré contemporain
While the walk is beautiful and relaxing, the village isn’t very exciting. It’s small and compact, with a few holiday houses and a restaurant (or two). The church in the village is something special though. It’s filled with contemporary religious art by Jean-Marie Pirot-Arcabas. Not being a religious person or an art connaisseur, I was mostly impressed by the warmth of the colours and the way he portrayed everything in his pieces. We were really impressed by the atmosphere that was created in this small space on top of a mountain. Perfect closure of an afternoon. We picked up enough energy and inspiration for the whole week ahead.
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