Month: August 2014

Porquerolles was a nice town: good shower facilities (once you figured out the coin-op system), nice restaurants, a grocery store, scenic location, everything. We’d be back later.

First, we had to talk about the long term plan. Andreas did not like the sound of the transmission when it was in reverse, and he suspected that something was wrong in there. Our original plan had us making a 100-mile leap across the Mediterranean from the French coast to the island of Corsica. But typically a good bit of that would be under engine power if the winds weren’t cooperating, and we’d definitely need the engine if we got caught in a storm. We certainly would need it when navigating in close quarters in harbors. All said, Andreas decided (“Du, Andy”) it was too risky to do that leg, and decided it was better for us to stay near the French coastline. Andy and Nora were disappointed, as they had expected to see Corsica on this trip, but it’s a tough life, right? I didn’t care, I hadn’t seen ANY of these places before and it was all great.

After a slow morning we finally pulled in our ropes and set forth out of the Porquerolles harbor. Immediately we spotted a huge three-masted sailing ship heading towards us. It was named the Signora del Vento and flew the Italian flag; all of the sails were furled but it was still an impressive sight.

Before we left the island completely behind, we ducked into a cove, dropped anchor and went swimming! It was a beautiful little sheltered spot on the northeast coast of the island.

As we sailed away, we passed the ruins of a fort. We’d be back in a few days and I’d get some pictures of it then.

Out onto the open water with the gennaker!

Massive rock formations, massive yachts, another day on the Cote d’Azur.

After a particularly long day of sailing, we pulled into Port Frejus (the harbor part of the nearby town of Frejus), got sorely needed showers, got a typical fantastic French dinner (with surly waiter) at a waterfront restaurant, and turned in for the night.

Second day of sailing! I rose at dawn and cleaned up in the marina shower. Going into this trip, one of the unknowns for me was whether we’d be on the water around the clock, never showering, or stoppin at marinas occasionally, or what. I had no idea what I was in for, and was prepared to a slimy, smelly sailor for the full week. As it turned out, every night we’d sail into the marina of the nearest coastal town and dock the ship. All of these marinas have pay showers, so we stayed relatively clean. I say “relatively”, because after only a few hours in the sunshine on the open water, you are pretty nasty. The metamorphosis before and after shower was pretty remarkable, and lord knows I do love a long hot shower (ask my family, I’m notorious for it).

After shower, while Andreas et al were getting ready for departure, I hoofed down the marina to get a picture of this exotic old sailboat that was undergoing a restoration. All along the marina were these boats being worked on by contractors, and this one was obvious historic and a labor of love for someone. I’m sure the comically long boom off the front identifies the type of sailboat, but I don’t know what it is.

After preparing the boat for departure, Andreas once again ceded the captain’s chair to Andy and enjoyed the view with me up front as we slowly eased out of the Marseille harbor. The castle on the right is Fort Saint-Jean, a 17th-century fort built by Louis XIV to protect the governor from the local people — the cannons were aimed not out towards the sea, but in towards town!

As we headed into the open water, we started to encounter more serious traffic. Marseille is the main ferry transit point for this part of the Mediterranean, and there is constant activity with both small pleasure boats going in and out of the old city harbor and huge commercial crafts accessing the big industrial harbor. Many of these big ships are ferry boats heading to Sardinia and Algiers, carrying both tourist traffic and regular commercial traffic. You do not want to be surprised to see one of these bearing down on your tiny little sailboat.

Once we cleared the harbor traffic, we put the boat onto autopilot (still on gas engines) and settled down for a nice late breakfast. German breakfasts are serious undertakings, with breads, meats, cheeses, juices, all sort of wonderful things. I devoured it all.

Finally, some sailing! Andreas, Andy and Nora got to unfurling the sails — I’d be helpful whereever I could, and whenever so ordered, but otherwise I stayed out of the way and watched them work. This type of sailboat (a ketch) has three sails, the big one in the middle of the boat called the mainsail, one at the front (bow) called a jib, and one at the back (stern) called a mizzen. So when setting sail, you’ve got three different sails and booms to deal with, and so enough to keep three people very busy for a couple minutes. But the ropes (“sheets”) that raise and control those sails all come back to the cockpit, so in theory at least ONE person could do the whole thing. Not likely though.

We had great wind, at our backs actually, and in that case you can bust out the king of the sails, the spinnaker. Instead of the smaller, triangular jib sail that is designed to work with crosswinds, the spinnaker simply blows up to huge size and grabs all of the wind to pull you straight ahead. In the photo at right you can see how the sail is kept furled inside a tube, and unfurled by pulling the tube up (via ropes and pullies, naturally) to release the sail inside. At left you see it fully unfurled for the first time — note the sailboat in the distance that is also running its spinnaker. Actually, our sail was a modified form of spinnaker called a gennaker, sort of a hybrid between a genoa sail and a spinnaker sail. Instead of both bottom corners flying free, held back only by ropes, in the gennaker one corner is held to the bow of the ship and the other corner is flying free. This way it’s off to one side of the boat, and actually catching slightly more wind than a spinnaker would, because you then sail with the wind slightly off your rear — the mainsail (in the middle of the boat) doesn’t “shadow” the gennaker and you get more total wind power driving the boat.

But wait, there’s more! One gennaker wasn’t enough, Andreas had to bring out two! Heck, we had them on board, might as well use them. In the photo to the right, you can see the mainsail (in the middle of the boat) brought down and bagged on top of the main boom, the fore/jib gennaker flying at the front of the boatd upper right of picture) and finally the second gennaker being let out by Andreas (in the extreme lower right corner of the picture, behind Nora).

All of these different sails and sail configurations are designed to extract as much power out of the wind and get you moving as fast as you can in the direction that you want to go. In this case, with all these sails running, we were pushing 12 knots, which I will tell you now is SERIOUSLY HAULING ASS. We were really flying, pounding through the waves at what seemed like breakneck speed.

After about an hour of fast running with the sails set like this, suddenly we had to spring into action. One of the cleats had popped off the main mast and a sail went flying. Andreas said that it was not one of the original cleats, rather one that a local worker had added for him. Poor quality work, but we also had too much rope tied off on that one little cleat — there are bigger cleats designed to handle bigger loads. Anyway, that’s actually really dangerous, and certainly things got real exciting for a minute there.

At some point, not long into this serious sailing, I started to realize that I didn’t feel so good. Uh oh. I settled into a corner and tried to keep my eyes up and on the horizon, but it wasn’t helping. That great big breakfast was coming back. I quietly signaled to Nora that I was about to become a, uh, unuseful crew member, took up a post on the side of the boat away from everyone, and … yeah, I got seasick.

Nora dug up some anti-nausea medication for me. It felt like a sleeping pill (which I hate) but it did the job. Along with generally taking it easy for the rest of the day, I didn’t get sick again. In future days, as long as I went easy on the breakfast (especially not loading up on orange juice, duh), I felt fine. I guess it just takes the body a couple days to adapt. Hey, I’m just like a good percentage of NASA astronauts!

Here’s a good view of the cockpit, the main seating area (I actually forget now what the right term is for it). It’s where the captain mans the controls, and where all the ropes end up. Close to us in this view is the red rope going around the port winch, a one-way ratcheting device that helps to pull the rope in and keep it tight. In this dual-gennaker configuration, Andreas decided to run the other rope (the green one) across the cabin — that’s not normal, but what we improvised that day. Then at the rear of the cabin (to the right in this picture) you see the main mast with quite a few ropes cleated off there.

We made our way along the French coast, east of Marseille, passing starkly beautiful geological formations along the way.

Our destination for the evening would be the town of Porquerolles, on the island of Iles d’Hyeres. We got in pretty late, and as I recall, Andreas had to sweet-talk someone into getting a berth — I think we got the private berth of someone who was out of town (with their boat).

Now finally Andreas would get a look at the transmission. As I wrote earlier, this was a brand new engine, mated to the old transmission. I had already heard about how matching those up had caused some drama in the past year as they were doing the engine upgrade. But while we had been on the water today, in particular while maneuvering in close quarters in the harbors, Andreas became concerned about strange sounds that were coming from the transmission when the thing was put into reverse. So we popped the lid off the engine compartment, Andreas got down in there to take a look, and generally grumbled about the situation.

We washed up and headed to dinner at a little restaurant in the town that was recommended by my cousin (and Andreas’ daughter) Cornelia. But we were all quite exhausted, me especially due to my bout of seasickness, and honestly we just wanted to get through dinner and to sleep. But after dinner we did wander round a bit. This town has a central square surrounded by little shops including groceries, so we were able to load up on perishables and the occasional toiletry. I believe I added once again to my growing collection of suntan lotion bottles. Walked around, watched a bocce game (actually here it’s called boule or petanque), and headed back to the sailboat and finally some rest.

As I wrote in the preview post, my uncle Andreas is a (mostly) retired German businessman who has a condo on the French coast and does quit a bit of sailing. His biggest boat is a 41-foot Euros, built in the 1970s by the French shipwright firm Amel. My uncle has had the boat for years and has gone on many sailing voyages with it.

I have been planning this sailing trip for about two years. Two summers ago, Andreas went on two-month trip around the Mediterranean, and was joined by friends and family at various times during the trip. I heard about this and declared my intent to join him someday, and we quickly made plans to target this summer for the trip.

I didn’t know how to sail. I mean, I understand the physics of it, but that’s not worth much. So last summer I spent a month of Saturdays driving up to Acworth (Atlanta exurb) to take sailing lessons on Lake Allatoona at the Atlanta Yacht Club. They teach you the basics — what are the parts of a typical small sailboat, how does the wind work with the sails, what is the lingo used to communicate between the people operating the boat. They shoved us out on the lake in little “420” sailboats, each manned by two people, and we learned on the go. By the end I was pretty comfortable with it, although most days we had very little wind.

A few weeks ago, I had a refresher session with a friend who has a boat on that lake.

So here I am, on a sailboat at dawn, heading out into the Mediterranean Sea. Besides Andreas and me, also on board are my cousin Andy and his girlfriend Nora. Andy (Andreas’ son) has lots of experience sailing as well, and so between the two of them we’d always have someone at the helm who knew what they were doing. The rest of us were “crew”, meaning it was our job to make sail adjustments per the captain’s orders. Most of the time, we would just be executing a simple turn (usually a “tack” into the wind), which is just about the most basic sailing maneuver there is, so in theory we all knew what we had to do.

Of course, that’s assuming there’s some wind, and open water. At dawn this particular morning, we had neither. Fortunately, this ship has an engine (which would figure into the story later) and so if we are lacking wind, or open water to sail back and forth in, we just pull in the sails and fire up the engine. It pokes along at about 7 knots (8 miles per hour) which is obviously slow by road standards but honestly feels like a good clip when you are in the open water and sloshing through ocean.

The tentative plan, shown to the right, is to disembark from our home port (Port Camargue) and spend eight days working our way around towards Corsica and back. At the end of the sailing voyage (or at least my part of it) we will arrive in Marseille, where I will catch a train back to Paris, straight to the airport and back to Atlanta.

So, our first day’s leg was to simply get out of the home port and make the hop over to Marseille.

Andy fired up the engine and we slowly navigated out of the small harbor and into the open water. As it turns out, we didn’t have much wind on this first day, and while we did unfurl some sails at some point, they weren’t doing much for us. I could have sworn I took pictures of them, but don’t see them in my picture archive now, so who knows. Not to worry, LOTS of pictures of sails are coming! I do recall that I was quite comfortable on the water, with no hint of seasickness. But for how long …

So we went back to motoring. Which Andreas was happy to do, since this was the first time he got to see his new engine in operation. The sailboat had been in drydock for over a year (maybe two) to get the engine replaced, and it now had a brand new Volvo marine engine in it. The engine was directly below our feet in the main cockpit / wheelhouse area, and provided a solid thrumming soundtrack to complement the gentle waves that we were slowly plowing through.

After a whole day of sailing (driving, really), we approached the busy harbor of Marseille. The old harbor in the city center was utterly jammed with a variety of pleasure boats, both sailboats and motor yachts, and it took us a while to find our berth.

After cleaning ourselves up, Andreas and I hurried into the city streets to find a few critical supplies — suntan lotion and USB chargers, can you imagine anything more important? Then we met up with Andy and Nora, found a place to eat (the memory of which now escapes me), got back to the boat, and turned in for the night.

Packed up and headed to the train station! Well, first to just leave my bags in a locker and do a little more sightseeing, as the train wouldn’t be leaving until the afternoon. After dropping off the load, I wandered around the city center a bit, took a mouette across the lake again (to get from point A to point B, really!), saw an interesting outdoor exhibition about world poverty along the lake, and made my way to the science museum.

Geneva’s science museum is actually a museum of the history of science, which of course is even more fascinating, especially for an adult — that’s me! As with several other attractions in Geneva, it’s housed in a former mansion overlooking the lake. Inside are all manner of crazy awesome displays, from a collection of glass eyeballs to the actual contraption, in the flesh, that Charles Coulomb used to determine the laws of electrostatic attraction and repulsion over 200 years ago. On the second floor balcony, there’s a camera obscura set up (you can make it out in this photo) that is aimed at Mont Blanc 70 miles away, so you can see the mountain dimly projected on the rear surface of the contraption.

Relaxed for a while on the lawn in front of the science museum, and then headed to the train station for my departure. Happily, there was a train that went direct from Geneva to Montpelier (France), which is where my uncle Andreas would be picking me up. I had booked all of the trains on this trip ahead of time, except for this one, because I originally wasn’t sure of when I’d get access to CERN and wanted to be flexible. So once the CERN situation was set up, I booked this train and was relieved that there was a direct connection and that there was space on it!

The TGV trains (French bullet trains) typically run at up to 200 miles per hour, but not this one. Geneva is nestled in the western Alps and we needed to get through those mountains before getting to open land. So the train twisted through narrow mountain valleys. Spotted a hanglider and some generally gorgeous scenery.

After we cleared the mountains, the trained stopped in Lyon, then sped up for the long leg to Montpelier. Montpelier is the TGV city nearest to Port Camargue and is where my uncle picked me up.

A short drive in the little convertible VW Beetle and we were at the dockside apartment and the boat! Met cousin Andy and his girlfriend Nora, enjoyed a nice dinner on the dock, and settled down to my last night of sleep before .. who knows what.

Europe trip, phase 2, coming up!

Having thoroughly explored CERN and the LHC, it was finally time to see the rest of the city. Geneva is a fabulously wealthy city in a gorgeous lakeside setting. Visitors to the city get to ride the transit system for free, so I was able to zip all over the place without really having to worry about anything other than which streetcar to get onto.

I headed over to the northeast part of town, where the United Nations campus was. Aside from the UN buildings themselves, there are a number of old mansions scattered around that have been repurposed as museums of one sort or another. First stop was the Musee Ariana, a serene 1880s structure that actually wasn’t built as a residence, rather was designed to house artwork from the beginning.

Inside is the Swiss Museum of Ceramics and Glass, but I really just went inside to be amazed by the decor. Other than the polite and welcoming staff, I think I was the only person in the building.

On the grounds a short stroll away was the Shinagawa Bell. The original bell had disappeared from the Tokyo temple in the nineteenth century, reappeared in Switzerland in 1873 and was installed in this park. The city of Geneva returned it to Japan in 1930. Sixty years later, in gratitude, the temple offered Geneva this replica of the bell.

Arriving at the United Nations proper, I found that I would not have time to properly tour the complex. A few snapshots would have to do.

Across the street from the UN entrance, the monumental Broken Chair sculpture stands as a reminder to the politicians of the scourge or land mines and the horrors and lasting scars of war in general.

Onwards, through the adjacent Botanical Gardens, which were truly great and resulted in lots of photos to show Sharon later. One memorable part was the educational but somewhat kooky display they had showing the various materials and substances that derive from the plant world — fibers, foodstuffs, pharmaceuticals. Hey, alliteration!

Finally, Lake Geneva itself!

Lake Geneva is about 35 miles long, and maybe 10 miles wide at its widest; near Geneva, the western end, it’s maybe a mile or two wide. I strolled along the lakes edge, watching people (and occasionally their dogs) enjoying the beautiful weather.

The Geneva transit system (free to tourists as I’ve mentioned) includes little ferry boats across the lake called “mouettes“, French for “gulls”. They’re not on a set schedule, rather just go back and forth all day, so you won’t wait more than 15 minutes or so for one. I boarded the next one and within 5-10 minutes was across the lake.

… After getting a good look at the Jet d’Eau (“water jet”, duh). This water feature is out at the end of a jetty poking into the middle of the lake, and it’s huge. HUGE. Pumps at the base shoot the water 500 feet into the air, and depending on which way the wind is blowing, the water’s going to rain down on you. I decided the boat ride was close enough.

Making my way through the old city center, I toured the Saint Pierre Cathedral, a 12th century colossus with a steeple that you can climb up to and get a view of the city from. Actually, it’s not the steeple proper, rather one of the two adjacent towers. While I was snapping the pictures to make this panorama, the clock happened to strike 5pm and I was treated to the hourly (daily?) ringing of the chimes. Loud!

I spent quite a while up there, actually, taking pictures, visually wandering the city, and snapping a few photos of myself as proof of my existence in all this.

On my way out, I stopped to enjoy a trio of musicians busking in the square in front of the cathedral. Were they busking? Maybe just practicing.

Headed back to the hotel to relax a little while, then went off in hunt of a laundromat. I didn’t pack enough clothes to go the whole 16-17 days, and was couting on taking care of some laundry at this point in Geneva, before heading to Marseilles and the sailing trip. I honestly did not know if we’d be at port during the sailing trip, what the laundry situation would be, so wanted to be prepared. So, in the Geneva laundromat, it took me a while but I eventually figured out how to translate the signs (all in French) and operate the machines. Found an Asian restaurant down the street, replenished myself, and finished up a long day.

As described in the previous post, I had managed to sweet-talk my way into another tour. This second tour would go to some other locations in the complex that I hadn’t seen.

Whereas yesterday was rainy, today we had great weather, so I arrived early and took some exterior pictures. This gigantic wooden (!) building is the “Globe of Science and Innovation” and was a gift to CERN from the people of Switzerland. It houses the “Universe Of Particles” exhibit, which was sadly closed the week I was there, apparently for renovations. The pictures of it look pretty damn cool — click and take a look.

Met up with my designated tour and boarded the bus. We’d be going to two locations — SM18 and CMS.

SM18 is the main testing facility for the magnets that are used in the LHC ring. I have no idea what “SM18” stands for — maybe “superconducting magnet” something. As I explained in the previous post, the accelerator ring uses extremely powerful magnets to bend the beam into a circle 27 km around. Even though the construction was completed in 2008, there are about 1600 magnet sections and there is bound to be repair and repalcement activity. This is especially true during a shutdown period such as 2013-2014, which is when they have their one chance to really take the thing apart and service it.

So what we got a glimpse of was a huge industrial space where they loaded in the dipole magnet sections, each about 15 meters long and weighing multiple tons, and ran them through a series of tests. I can’t tell you how excited I was to see them actually moving the sections around, actually testing them, showing actual results on the large aerial displays. If you look closely at the numbers in this picture, on the display you will see:

– 12843 Amps (insanely high electrical current) – 1.9 Kelvin (extremely low temperature)

Very cool, literally!

We were only allowed into a little corner of the building, but they had all sorts of cool models and hardware on display for us. Models of the building with little trucks showing how gear moved in and out. Models of the tube with all of the magnets and superconducting wires packed around it. Various hardware like an actual dipole section with the side cut out of it so you could get a view of the innrds. A cryogenic valve. Dipole magnets, quadrupole magnets, sextupole magnets, oh my!

Back onto the bus and onwards through the French / Swiss countryside, with beautiful views of the Jura mountains.

Up next: a visit to the CMS complex. Similarly to yesterday’s LHCb, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is located at a point along the LHC ring where the two beams are corssed to produce collisions. However CMS is contained within a gigantic cavern, much bigger than LHCb’s — only the ATLAS cavern matches it in size. And ATLAS was already sealed up getting ready for operations, so CMS would be my one chance to see one of the big LHC experiments.

First they showed us around the surface level buildings, which contain various support items like cranes, gas storage tanks, air chillers, etc., but all on a very large scale.

We passed through some security — not so much checking for authorization, rather checking for radiation, like in a nuclear power plant. After the nuclear screening, we stepped into a freight elevator (with some workers, 20 of us and 4 of them) and then descended waaaaaaaay down into the earth.

I don’t even remember the distance now, but I did grab this snapshot looking UP the main access shaft to the surface. That bore was some 60 feet wide, originally sized to lower the gargantuan experiment components down to the cavern, but once they finished loading down the big items, they filled in the shaft with various other infrastructure — like a couple proper elevators, ventilation, and so forth.

As we worked our way closer to the cavern, we passed room after room of support equipment. Not everything has to be located right inside the experiment area proper, but it also can’t be located too far away (like at the surface), because then the computer communications would slow down. They are dealing with massive amounts of data, literally the highest data flows on the planet, and in those applications the distance the communications has to travel is a factor.

Finally, one more door, and the main cavern.

The picture above is of the center of the CMS experiment. When the LHC is operating, one beam crosses from left to right, and another one in the opposite direction, and they collider along the axis in the center. Surrounding that collision point is meters and tons of electronics to detect the various particles that spray away from the center. Pictured at right is a just a detail of part of the machine; click it to embiggen.

Aaand back up to the surface! Off in a corner I noticed some gear on carts, looked like data acquisition equipment. I just thought the connector were interesting — the big round ones are European-standard high power connectors, and the rectangular ones to the left are Amphenol parallel data connectors.

At the surface level, where they have a bit more room to spare, they have a few displays set up, such as this item reminiscent perhaps of a Jules Verne story, but actually an RF energy storage cavity for the old LEP that preceded the LHC in the same tunnel. These were the kinds of things that they had all over the courtyard at the visitors center, the courtyard that we could not actually get to, only peer at through windows. Special thanks to the person who stuck a sheet of paper on the thing explaining what it was!

The assembly hall at the surface was sized big enough to put together the major components of the experiment, which were then lowered through the access shaft. This picture shows the end of the hall with a gigantic life-sized picture of one of the components, before it was lowered, showing how it did literally barely fit in the hall (and the shaft, and the cavern).

Our last stop at the CMS complex was to visit a modest exhibition they had set up showing the various components. Here you could get up close and personal with the parts. In this picture you can see the scale of the superconducting magnets at the very center of the beam.

Back on the bus, back to the visitors center, and done. Thank you CERN!

Now, on to the rest of Geneva …

At long last, the day had come: I was going to visit CERN. For 50 years, the European Center for Nuclear Research (frenchify that to get the CERN acronym) has been home to particle accelerators of increasing power. Particle accelerators are basically state of the art microscopes, the most extreme instruments we have to be able to peer into the structure of the atom. Particle accelerators are rather crude, simply smashing atoms together and watching the pieces that fly out of the collision, and each generation accelerator gets better and better by essentially smashing the atoms together harder and harder.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, CERN operated a series of accelerators, starting with a 600 MeV ring and ending with a 62 GeV system. The “eV” in there stand for “electron Volt“, and is how they measure how fast the atoms are going before they smash into each other. These units are metric, and use the SI system, so you’ll see a letter in front of the “eV” signifying how many multiples of 1000 to apply. So 1 MeV is one million eV (10 to the 6th power, or 10^6), 1 GeV is one billion eV (10^9), and 1 TeV is one trillion eV (10^12). It’s like computer hard drives, which were sized in MB (megabytes) in the early days, then GB, and lately TB.

In 1989, CERN started up the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP), which offered collision energies of 200+ GeV (or 0.200 TeV). To achieve this, they built a huge, circular tunnel under the farmland that surrounded CERN, measuring about 12 feet (4 m) wide and 17 miles (27 km) in circumference. Inside that tunnel, they built the electronic pipes that hurled the two beams in two opposite directions around the ring. The LEP ran for 11 years, but was frequently outperformed by US accelerators like the Tevatron.

In 2000, after years of planning, they shut down the LEP and started dismantling it. In its place, in the same tunnel, they would build the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which would have the same physical dimensions, but would make use of the latest technology to achieve vastly higher energies (speeds). The LHC is designed to hurl particles at energies of 7 TeV in each beam, thus colliding at energies of 14 TeV, or 14,000 GeV, or 70 times more powerful than the LEP that previously occupied the same tunnel. Foremost of the new technologies was superconduction, which can be used to make insanely powerful magnets, which are then strong enough to “steer” a much more powerful particle beam around that same ring. Like they say in NASCAR, go fast and turn left. However, to get those magnets to work, you need to supercool them, hundreds of degrees below what we would call normal.

The United States had planned to build a similar particle accelerator on the same principles, but one that would have utterly dwarfed even today’s LHC. It was called the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) and construction actually got underway in east Texas in the 1980s, but the construction cost (54 miles of tunnels!) became too much for the federal budget to bear, and it was cancelled. Thus began a sort of “brain drain”, where our best physicists started to gravitate towards Europe where CERN was building the LHC. Further, in some cases the lure of filthy lucre became too great, and many of these physicists ended up on Wall Street as “quants”, essentially harnessing their command of advanced mathematics to model the financial markets and create new ways to conjure money out of thin air. I’ve heard it argued, perhaps in jest, that the $750 billion bailout of our financial markets in 2008 could have been avoided by simply spending a few billion dollars on the SSC …

I should mention that it’s not just the “eV” power of the accelerator that matters. How those beams get focused, and how the data gets analyzed, are also crucial performance issues that drive how productive an accelerator is.

Where was I? Oh, right, visiting CERN. OK, let’s get on with it then.

By nice coincidence (actually some planning), the streetcar that ran past my hotel would take me straight to CERN. CERN is out in the suburbs of Geneva, at the very end of the streetcar line that they had only recently extended out there. All I had to do was hop on, watch Geneva go by for about 30 minutes, and at the end of the line I’d be in the center of the most cutting edge scientific research facility on the face of the planet.

The public face of the CERN complex is a surprisingly modest visitors center, but it hides a large museum, containing seemingly every artifact of 50 years of exploration at the smallest scales. Hardware of all shapes and sizes, displays and movies that explain what they do, examples of how computer storage worked back in the day … In a courtyard that we couldn’t get to, but could see through the windows, they had all sorts of impossibly exotic gear mounted and displayed, literally put out to pasture outside. Signs, signs, I have to read the signs!

To the tour! Months prior to this, I had checked the CERN website and found that while they do offer tours that go to interesting places (e.g. down into the tunnel, not just surface buildings), there weren’t any tours available in my timeframe. Oh no! One day later, after an eloquent and pleading email to their tour managers, I had a spot on some other group’s tour. And they confirmed that we would go down into the tunnel!

Being able to see the tunnel was actually quite a unique opportunity. As a high energy physics experiment, when the beams are running, it’s quite radioactive in the tunnel, and nobody is allowed in there, not even workers. Like a nuclear power plant, everyone clears out of the tunnel and they seal the doors before starting the sequence to fire up the machine. Well, 2013-2014 was a major period or planned downtime, when they would be really shutting the machine down, and basically taking it apart and refurbishing it. So during that extended downtime, they were letting the public get even closer to the equipment than they normally would. However, the shutdown was coming to an end, and some parts of the tunnel were already off limits to even CERN workers. This timing is why I made the effort in the first place to get to Geneva on this trip.

The CERN folks corralled us onto a bus and we headed off into the Swiss countryside. Well, actually, the French countryside, because right after pulling out of the parking lot, we crossed the Swiss-French border. There hasn’t been any border control in most of Europe since the Schengen Area was agreed to in the mid-90s, which the Swiss finally joined in 2008. So there are all these abandoned border posts, and we just drove right through it.

Our first stop would be the LHCb. At each of four points around the 17-mile ring, CERN built a massive underground cavern around the precise spot where they would collide the beams. With a 7 TeV beam going in one direction around the ring, and a 7 TeV beam going the other direction, they would have 14 TeV collision energies, and the cavern was built to house the colossal machinery that would be needed to detect and measure the sub-atomic bits that came flying off. The “LHC-beauty” experiment was one of those four collision points, and was designed to examine and characterize the “beauty” particle, so named because physicists have a sense of humor …

Our tour guide was a young Polish physicist named Agnieszka, and she led us first through the small displays they had set up in a waiting area at the surface level. The bulk of the machinery was below us, but they still need a hall at the surface to stage material and raise from / lower to the tunnel. Also up here was the main control room, unmanned because of the long-term shutdown, but which would be humming again soon enough.

Right about this point is where I realized something horrible: my battery camera was almost dead. I had obviously been planning the logistics of this visit for a very long time, and I had packed extra camera batteries and made sure to charged them up. But I had left them at the hotel! Oh shiiiiiiiiit. I was about to into the CERN tunnel, and my camera would be dead!

Now I started to be very miserly about photos, and the camera’s power. Turn camera on, take a photo, turn off. In the end, I got the minimum amount of pictures I needed to be happy, but it was a stupid mistake.

Agnieszka handed us off to her colleague (and fellow Pole) Rafal, who would take us down to the tunnel. They handed us all hardhats (color coded to our tour group) and had us go through the security checkpoint. This was basically a fancier version of what you go through at the airport, or what I used to do when working in nuclear power plants.

After all of us had scanned through, we got into a freight elevator and went down.

Down.

Down.

About 300 feet down, we got off at one of the cavern levels. The cavern is about 70 feet high, with metal lattice work forming multiple levels (stories) for workers to use to access equipment. Our first stop was in a side section of the cavern containing a monstrous instrument left over from the LEP days. This same cavern had been used in the LEP, and when they dismantled that system and started building the LHC, they had room in this cavern to just shove this instrument off to the side. Since it obviously had been decommissioned, we were allowed to get up close and personal with it.

A panorama photo of the LHCb cavern!

A short walk away and (cue angelic choirs) the LHCb experiment! This machine was basically a horizontal stack of vertical layers. The beam would come in from the right, the collision would occur in the right side of the cavern, and the particles would spray off to the left, through all those detector layers. If you scrutinize the smaller LHCb photo above, you will see a man wearing a yellow hardhat. Go to the upper left corner of the blue and white “LHCb” sign, go to the left past the white circle with the red object in the center, and just to the left of that you’ll see him.

On our way out, we passed a large wall that had a big picture of the tunnel on it, and we got to pose in front of it. So, it looks like I’m in the tunnel, not actually in the tunnel.

Also they had a nice poster of the women working on LHCb. Girl Power! Also, note the Comic Sans, which is a bit of a running joke at CERN.

Back on the bus, back across the French country side, back across the “border”, back to the visitor’s center.

Now, I wasn’t done. Not even close. In short, I sweet-talked the tour operators into finding an empty spot for me to join another group on another tour tomorrow! To a different cavern! And to the magnet test facility! Oh my god, I was so happy. In fact, after I finishing writing this, I’m going to email them and send them the link to this so they know how much I appreciated it.

And now, finally, to the gift store! The store was tiny (by US standards) but chock full of the most incredible books and science tchotchkes. I literally would have bought everything in the store, but everything was going to eventually need to fit into my suitcase, and later in this same trip I’d be lugging this suitcase onto a sailboat … So I bought some more compact items, took pictures of the bulkier items for future wishlist purposes, and headed back to the hotel.

After resting at the hotel for a bit, and soaking up some internet, I struck out on an evening jaunt. One of the first high-power EV charging stations had supposedly been installed in a suburb just west of Geneva. The streetcars didn’t run out there, but the busses did. So, in the failing light of mid-evening, I literally got off a bus in the middle of some strange residential neighborhood and hunted around for this charging station. Walked up and down little alleyways, through parking lots, all over the place. In the end, the charging station was located a good bit away from the map marker I was chasing — at a Volkswagen dealership, duh. But I found it!

Today would be a travel day, taking a series of trains from Hiedelberg to Geneva. After a good breakfast, my niece and nephew escorted me to Hiedelberg’s main train station, and from there commenced another sequence of trains, remarkable in reliability and punctuality. About 45 minutes after departing Hiedelberg, the train arrived in Karlsruhe, where I’d switch to another train. At 28 minutes, this would be the longest “layover” of the entire Europe trip, and I used the time to take care of some logistics — get a German SIM card for the cell phone (long story), send a few texts to confirm that it worked, buy a power supply for the tablet (which would become a long story). Kept an eye on the clock and scurried to the platform in time to watch my next train arrive.

Next stop, two hours later, was the Swiss city of Basel, just over the border from Germany.

From then on, I’d be on Swiss trains, and started to hear the Swiss German accent, almost comically and gratuitously gutteral to my ears.

This next run would provide some of the best views of the train rides in this trip, with the train winding somewhat slowly through the low mountains of the Jura chain, north of the Alps proper. After an hour we cleared the mountains and arrived in Biel, at the northeastern end of the long valley that is home to Lake Biel and Lake Neuchatel.

One more train change and I was finally on the last leg to Geneva. For the last half hour or so, we rode along the north shore of Lake Geneva, and the good weather provided for impossibly beautiful views out the window.

Finally, after 4 trains and 6 hours of travel, I arrived in Geneva. After getting a local map and my bearings, I hopped onto a tram and made my way to the hotel a few minutes away. Well, it would turn out to be only a few minutes away … I still needed to figure out where exactly it was and how to navigate the tram system to get to it.

Met the slightly crazy checkin lady at the hotel, checked in and found my room, plugged in all the devices that needed plugging in … Whoops, my plug wouldn’t work. Hey, guess what? Switzerland’s power plug looks like it’s the same as that used everywhere else in Europe, but it’s not! The prongs are a leeeeetle bit smaller, which means all those plug adapters I brought are useless! Yay! Fortunately, right next to the hotel there was a mobile phone store that happily took my money in order to supply me with a USB power supply that was compatible with the Swiss outlets.

Which leads to another thing: the Swiss have not signed onto the Euro currency used nearly everywhere in Europe (insert monetary policy explanations here), instead sticking with their own Swiss Franc (CHF) currency. Stores will take Euros, but you’ll get your change back in CHF, which has a different exchange rate. Take that pile of strange coins in your hand, and couple that with the language barrier, and I suspect they routinely fudge the conversion numbers in their favor when giving you change. Geneva is already a very expensive city, and this only exacerbates it. Oh well.

Grabbed the map, hustled across the old city center to get to the lake before nightfall. Got a sandwich at a stand (meat and pretzel, together at last) and enjoyed my first view view of the Jet d’Eau while chowing down. Back to hotel, internet, sleep. Tomorrow would be a long day.

I survived the rough night and had a nice breakfast with the extended family in the hostel’s cafeteria. Actually, I took it easy on the breakfast, just sampling crackers etc., which was a shame since it was a typically luxurious German spread of meats and cheeses.

We gathered up the herd outside the hostel, took a few last pictures of the Trifels in the distance, and loaded up into the vehicles. Stefan’s planned activity for us this morning was to hike up the Ringelsberg, a small mountain nearby, which had a nice little cafe at the top. Typical German activity: sweat it up a long mountain hike, to reach the wine-soaked reward at the top. I was still feeling a little dodgy so tried to smuggle in apple juice as my drink, but Andreas busted me so I had to fess up.

The view was incredible. Miles and miles of farmland, grapevines heavy with fruit, ringed by the low, rolling mountains of the Pfalz.

And that would be the end of the big reunion! We said our goodbyes and split up. I joined cousin Susann and her family in their VW camper van for the hour-ish drive to their home in Heidelberg. Susann and family are a funny bunch — they’ve always been a very outdoorsy family, and so they only have that one big camper van as a family vehicle. If they’re not going on a long roadtrip somewhere, they’d rather just bike it or even walk it. Appropriately, the family business is a busy bike shop in central Heidelberg.

So, naturally, upon arrival in at their Heidelberg house (greeted by cat), we had a snack and then promptly set out on a hike around the neighborhood. The city of Heidelberg is on the Neckar River, nestled between two ridges, one of which climbs up behind their house. So we hiked all around, starting with a visit to a property a few minutes away that Susann and Peter would be building a new house on . Continuing, we went up to the top of the ridge for a view, down past an old monastery, along the river, and generally had a great afternoon exploring.

Late that evening, after a great dinner out at a local favorite restaurant, I bored my nephew Simon with space videos.

Booking a train that departed at 6am wasn’t going to be a problem for me, since I was going to be jetlagged and up by 5am anyway …

The European train system is amazing — a full month ago, I booked this travel leg via the Deutsche Bahn website, and it went exactly as planned. I started out on a German “Inter City Express” (ICE) train in Paris, going 200 MPH, transferred in Saarbrucken, transferred in Neustadt, transferred in Landau, and ended up on a local train going 20 MPH as it rolled into Annweiler about 5 hours later. Where my aunt Renate and cousin Cornelia were waiting on the platform for me!

Annweiler is a small town in southwestern Germany, very close to the French border, where my mother’s side of the family hails from. As a child of age 14, I lived in Annweiler with my grandmother for a full year, going to the German high school there with my cousin Stefan and getting immersed in German culture. It was the beginning of a private, family exchange program that we ended up running in our extended family — I went to Germany for a year, than a cousin came to live with us in the U.S. for a year (including going to high school with us), then one of my sisters went over, and so on, back and forth for a good 15 years.

The extended family was gathering in Annweiler to celebrate my cousin Stefan’s 50th birthday. Stefan is the oldest of our generation — altogether there were (counts on fingers) nine of us born between 1963 and 1980, in two waves, as each of the three Conrad daughters had three children. Besides our generation, the older generation was fully represented, as was the younger generation, including the two latest additions Theodor and Lukas. I was the sole representation for the American arm of the family.

My first stop in Annweiler was to visit with Günther Frey. Günther is a longtime family friend, and by longtime I mean like over 50 years. He group with my mom and her sisters, and his wife Herma was my mom’s best friend growing up. Sadly Herma passed away a couple years ago. Renate joined me in visiting with Günther, which was very helpful because my German is always very weak at the beginning of these trips, and so she helped translate as needed. Günther looks to be in great health and it was amazing to visit the Frey household (one that I’d been in as a teenager) and catchup on the status of his children Anja, Klaus and Ulrike, now all grown and with kids of their own.

After parting with Günther, Renate and I met up with the whole family at a restaurant in the town center. After a bit of hanging out and snacking, we split up into various cars and headed out to a winery, where an afternoon tasting event had been planned. It’s just amazing to be driving through the heart of wine country in August, just before the harvest, seeing mile after mile of neat rows of grapevines flitter past. At the winery, Weingut Theo Mingus, more family showed up and we had a great time catching up. I got to meet my newest nephew Lukas, only 2 months old. My uncle Andreas was there, and we talked a bit about our upcoming sailing trip, which would be getting underway in about 5-6 days. But Andreas was rightfully a lot more interested in his grandson, his first. Can you imagine what that must feel like, to hold your very first grandchild in your arms?

After the winery, most of us migrated to the hotel for checkin. Well, not exactly “hotel” and not exactly “checkin”. The regular hotels in the area were all booked up (the region attracts nature tourist) and so we were going to be staying at the local hostel, the “Turnerjugendheim” or “sports youth home”, not really a youth hostel but somewhere between that and a hotel. OK, maybe it was a hostel, but it was a brand new one and I had been provided with a room for myself. My cousins had taken care of all of the logistics, and I just had to follow people around and enjoy the ride. So someone handed me a key, I settled into my private room for a bit, and we got ready for the evening’s party.

I got my first look at my other new nephew, Theodor, who is now about 6 months old. Just like his mother (my cousin), the cute meter is pegged on this kid, just off the charts. And Theodor got to meet Lukas!

Back into the cars and to the party! It was being held in a local restaurant, with a good 30 or so of Stefan’s friends and family all gathered to celebrate in a private room in the back of the restaurant. Great food, drinks and catching up. Stefan gave us a speech on the occasion, beautifully recognizing all of the people that had made the trip, and those few that were not able to make it. (Helmut and Sabrina and Marcy, you were missed!) A great time was had by all.

As far as the time zone change, I was doing pretty good until about 11pm, when my body hit the wall. Jet lag was really insisting that I sleep — never in my life have I wanted to sleep so bad. Problem was, I was reliant on someone else (anyone else) for transport back to the hostel. That finally happened at around midnight, and I finally collapsed into bed. … Only to wake up 3 hours later. In my desperately tired stupor, I had forgotten to take the melatonin. Melatonin is a natural hormone that helps you cope with jet lag by helping you stay asleep through the night. I have sworn by the stuff for two decades; without it, I will wake up halfway through the night. Well, I forgot, and so I woke up. Then other things happened (I got really sick). In short, it was a rough night.