motorhome life

Gorgeous Gorge

| Mairead

(Gorges de la Loire, from the village on the hill)

We stayed a second night looking down on the Loire and it was just as quiet as the first. We didn’t get to use the jetons though as we were too far away from the electricity connection. We managed fine.

(Here’s a picture for my brother-in-law. There’s a lot of varieties of fish here, Micheal!)

We did also have to dig into the emergency rations. I knew those celery sticks I packed would could in handy. They were lovely with some just out of date hummus.

(Everywhere you turn there’s another path to follow)

It turns out our view is created by the dam (called barrage here) that was built up river. This is for the creation of electricity and for tourism in the form of fishing and a sailing school.

(Can you see the sail boats in a row? That’s the sailing school taking some school children out for a lesson)

We left this morning just as the sun was coming over the hill thinking about how lucky we are to have the opportunity to stay in places like this.

(The sun rising over the hill behind us)

Practicing gratitude, Mairead.

Walking Lyon

| Mairead

(Cathedral Saint-Jean-Baptiste)

We walked Lyon yesterday and clocked up 11 kilometers. It’d be nice to think we are very fit now, but no, we both fell asleep when we got back to Ruby. I was even too tired to write. Probably the smart way to get fit is to start small but repeat. Every day. Yes, that’s probably it.

(Well that’s very familiar)

Anyways, Lyon is big, much bigger than Dijon. We’ve never been before and we didn’t have any idea what to go see. Denis was interested in the food as Lyon is called the belly of France, in a good way. There’s an area called Vieux Lyon, old Lyon, that seemed to be a good place to start.

(Less familiar, a bouchon restaurant, traditional Lyon)

After a stressful (for me) drive through the city on Friday afternoon we arrived at the International Camping campsite. We picked it because it had good public transport links to the city. If I had known we had to drive through Lyon to get to the good transport links I might have suggested giving Lyon a miss. I’m glad I didn’t though, it was worth the temporary increase in stress.

(Thats the front of the train – there’s no driver on the metro…)

Saturday morning at 8.30am, we headed for the bus (just outside the gates) to the metro station and into Vieux Lyon. Half an hour later we were walking out on to the streets of Vieux Lyon not knowing which direction to turn. Left seemed as good a choice as any. Very soon I was experiencing déjà vu. What does this remind me of? Over there was a cathedral, down that alley the river, there’s an Irish pub and another one here and oh, there’s another one… Probably just homesickness but this was looking a lot like Temple Bar on the morning after a few stag parties. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were in the wrong place. We kept going regardless, maybe Christchurch would be just around the corner.

(Footbridge crossing the river Saône – it was a little wobbly)

Everything was better when we crossed the river, well one of the rivers. Lyon is built across two rivers that meet in the city, the Rhône and the Saône. We crossed the Saône and wandered for a while until we found ourselves in a beautiful square, Place de Terreaux. Well, it would be a beautiful square again, at the moment it is in the middle of a facelift.

(Place de Terreaux getting its facelift. Also can you see the graffiti? On the chimneys? Artists without fear)

Then somehow we were led into the garden of the Musée Des Beaux-Arts de Lyon. Possibly because of my earlier wobble of stress, this garden had the most powerful effect on my mood and just standing in it, I felt completely at peace with the world again.

(Here’s my peaceful garden at the Musée Des Beaux-Arts de Lyon)

Then it seemed like the right thing to do, was to go and visit the museum and we did. It’s a lovely space, the layout and art works are very attractive. We spent two hours wandering and looking and pointing and taking pictures and although we were ready to leave after the two hours we didn’t feel exhausted.

(I rarely love sculptures but I loved so many here. These two are my favourites. The first one is called The Mountain, by Aristide Maillol and the second is called The Mad Virgin by Rik Wouters – is it strange that I find her inspiring? She looks so happy!)

I think our lack of exhaustion could be down to the building itself and its high ceilings and the fact that we just wandered. So often I get the audio guide to make sure I don’t miss anything. I listen to the guide tell me a lot of information while at the same time I’m taking in a lot of visual inputs. It does take a toll on your energy. Whatever the reason, the Musée Des Beaux-Arts de Lyon was a beautiful experience.

(I also loved this one, it’s supposed to be Mary when the angel says she’s pregnant. She seems to be saying, Will ya get away outta that!)

We had a lovely lunch and afternoon hot chocolate to give us energy and then we made our way back to the campsite. We will have to return to Lyon, we’ll do a walking tour some day, that worked very well in Porto. Whatever happens I’m definitely coming back to that Museum.

From now on I only want to be referred to as The Mad Virgin, The Mad Virgin.

(There’s Lyon)

Afternoon from Switzerland…

| Mairead

(Sunny day at CERN)

We visited Switzerland yesterday afternoon, as you do. We were there for the science. You may have heard of Conseil Europeén pour la Recherche de Nucléaire?(Me neither.) CERN, for short was set up after the Second World War to create a place in Europe where scientists could be scientists and share their work with this new postwar world. During the war a lot of scientists left Europe to work in the United States. People like Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the atomic bomb. Albert Einstein moved before the war and became an American citizen in 1940.

(We booked spaces on the free tour)

More recently you may have heard of CERN because of the Large Hadron Collider? No? Okay… if you had I could just bypass an explanation of it… are you sure you haven’t heard of it? If you’re sure I’ll give it a go but don’t ask any questions, I don’t know the answers. The Large Hadron Collider, LHC for short, is a device thought up by some people from CERN to work out what happened at the beginnings of the world. So far so good. Everything started off 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. That’s the theory and scientists love theories but the theories bring up lots of questions and the only way to answer those questions is to create experiments. CERN is a place where scientists can perform experiments.

(Here’s our tour guide in front of lots of information)

Scientists have to be incredibly patient people because experiments take a long time, they often don’t work and then they have to keep tweaking things and re-experimenting. What’s more, they have to create devices or machines for their experiments. The people at CERN have been creating theses machines since 1949. We saw one that was created in the 1950’s called the Synchro-Cyclotron, the main part of it was bigger than Ruby and was housed in a three story building.

(Inside the tube of the LHC)

Two of the scientists involved with the first Synchro-Cyclotron experiments are still working at CERN, Maria and Giuseppe Fidecaro. Not because they have to, they really, really like being around science and scientists.

(There’s a lovely article about them at https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/february-2014/couples-history-intertwined-with-60-years-of-cern)

(All the information from experiments since 1949 is stored on tape. They are starting to move it on the cloud)

And that was just the beginning. The scientists kept designing bigger “machines ” as the experiments got more complicated or as they say, interesting. Which leads us to the LHC (remember, the Large Hedron Collider?). Now, if you thought the Synchro-Cyclotron was big, wait until you hear this… The LHC comprises a 27km long circular tunnel built underground with 4 experiment buildings attached. What’s more, it’s located just across the border in France! (Side note: there’s an open border between Switzerland and France at CERN… something similar could be useful to us if the exit goes ahead.)

(The location is surrounded by corn fields and snow capped mountains)

What does the Large Hedron Collider do? It makes teeny tiny particles move very, very fast and then bump into each other. And then it measures what happens next. We didn’t get to see the LHC – it’s closed down for an upgrade which will take two years! Can I refer you back to scientists having a lot of patience. But we did get kinda close… our tour guide, who was from South Africa, is a Phd student proving her own experiments at the LHC. I did not understand her experiments and you’ll just have to trust me they sounded impressive.

But… there is one thing that was invented at CERN, that you use every day. It was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist. He invented The World Wide Web here. What we all call (imprecisely as it happens, scientists are very precise…) the Internet! Without CERN you wouldn’t be able to read this… well yes, of course you could be spending your time more wisely practicing French or going for a long walk.

Thanks a lot, CERN, Mairead.

(By the way, just to let you know in case you were worried (I was..) I checked and even though nuclear is in their name, it’s not like nuclear power or war or weapons… it’s just to do with the nucleus of atoms.)

(There’s CERN)

Wash Day at the Supermarket

| Mairead

(46 minutes at 60 degrees)

And the high point for today – washing our clothes. We’re parked at a supermarket in Prissé, which is a small town outside Mâcon. There’s a fine launderette with parking in one corner of the shopping center and I’m waiting here for the dryer to finish.

(There they go…)

The sun is shining and it would be so nice to hang the clothes out instead of putting them in a dryer. Can you imagine arriving at the supermarket at home and noticing clothes lines strung between the trees? Covered in pegged-up clothes? Actually, maybe that would be lovely! As an art project, I mean! No one wants to see our underwear strung around Tesco…

(You can tell a lot about a place by what they put in their supermarket foyer…. Charolais cattle originate in the Charolais area which is near here!)

I can see it now, colourful baby clothes, pretty children’s ballet dresses, worn dungarees, sparkly teenage dresses, white shirts, T-shirt’s with band logos, dark trousers, frilly bed-shawls. All the items grouped by age, like a life timeline. It could be called Life Line. Who’ll ring Tesco head office for me? Maybe Fairy Non-bio would sponsor us?

(This old wooden wine press was also in the foyer – wine production is big here too)

This is what happens when you don’t do ten other things while the clothes are being washed by the machine. If I was at home I’d be cutting something, making something, cleaning something or meeting someone while the clothes washed. Here I’m not a bit concerned with multi-tasking. The dishes are done, the floor is grand, there’s nothing I need to cut down or to make up and there’s no one to meet. I have an opportunity to let my imagination run wild, just for the fun of it.

Seriously, does anyone know the CEO of Tesco Ireland? Mairead.

(There we are in Prissé)