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Saturday, September 22, 2007

Lignières: When the Cows Come Home

cortege_vaches.jpg

When you live in Lignières, you have to be careful about using the expression “when the cows come home” because, at the end of September every year, they do. The occasion is the Désalpe de Lignières, which this year celebrated its 32nd anniversary. The weather was gorgeous, as it always is—wishing makes it so!

The highlight of the day is the cortège, in which cows, goats, sheep, horses, marching bands, whippersnappers, and tractor-pulled floats traverse the village. This is so much fun we do it twice: the parade makes two loops past the crowd. This year the Ski-Club made an enormous float including a wooden ski jump down which decidedly un-risk-averse members would ski or snowboard, coming, they hoped, to a soft and upright landing on the unforgiving pavement, which had already been liberally lubricated by dielectric material deposited by the cows preceding them in the parade.

Click the image above for a gallery of images from this year's Désalpe. All of these images were taken with a Nikon D200 digital SLR with an 18–200 mm VR zoom lens (almost all at the wide angle limit) in “full auto” mode. These images are in the public domain.

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