Author: greg

Summer Road Trip

Following offspring #2’s university year, she came to France for a visit, and we spent most of our time taking a road trip through southern France.

Southern France, in case you didn’t know, is bloody hot and humid in the summer. (Just a little FYI for you there.)

We stayed at a campground on the Mediterranean, which unfortunately had the beach closed during our stay. Classic me, amirite?

Still, there was plenty to keep us busy. We took day trips to Nîmes, the “most Roman city outside Italy,” complete with its impressively intact amphitheatre (still used for concerts and events even today) and maison carrée, then on to Valensole, in the heart of France’s lavender-growing region (and purported location of an alien close encounter), then out to the edge of Montpellier to visit an oceanographic aquarium.

With a couple of days left, we’re planning a stop in Annecy, near the Swiss border—which, from everything I’ve seen so far, might just be the French town I’d most like to live in. Unfortunately, it’s too far from Paris to be practical, but I still like to visit whenever I can.

Anyway, here are some photos to give you an idea of what we’ve been up to.

Sharks in the Seaquarium, Camargue
Lavender fields, near Valensole, France
Fountain in the town centre, Valensole, France

I’m Sorry, But 9.4 Is Past My Bedtime

So, everyone knows about the metric system for weights and measures that was introduced in France during the Revolution (I mean the one in the 1790s, not the Vendée Uprising, the July Revolution, the 100 Days, the Fronde, the February Revolution, the 1851 Coup d’État, the Bourbon Restoration or the other Bourbon Restoration).

And many people have at least heard of the French Republican Calendar from the same era. Coup of 18 Brumaire, anyone?

But did you know there was also a push to reinvent how to measure time itself? To ditch the 12-hour clock and 24-hour day and replace them with a decimal-based system of metric time?

Under this system, the day was divided into 10 hours, each hour into 100 minutes, and each minute into 100 seconds. That meant new time units like the centijour, or one one-hundredth of a day, equivalent to exactly 14 minutes and 24 seconds of old-fashioned time.

As you might expect, things got messy fast, not least because nobody could agree when it came to defining what a “second” actually was. That question was so thorny it wasn’t fully settled until the 1960s, when we landed on the modern definition based on the radioactive decay of a cesium-133 atom.

In theory, the system could have worked. Our 24-hour clock is just as arbitrary, after all, but people weren’t ready to set their clock-radio alarms* to 3.2 or to schedule their afternoon coffee break at 6.7. The metric clock, like the calendar that came with it, was ultimately swept into the dustbin of history.

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* Yeah, I know, 1790s… it’s a joke, people. Lighten up.

Di-Hydrogen Monoxide

Who needs it anyway?

Not me, apparently, since the city will be shutting off our H2O supply between 9 and 5 every day next week while they continue to work on the road outside my apartment.

Paris is nice and all, but finding stuff to do outside your apartment for 8 hours a day, five days in a row without spending a mess of money is giving me more stress than I want to deal with.