Author: Chris C.

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.

[Dec 2014: After 4 months, I’m finally getting around to writing this up. I’ll let everyone know about it after it’s done, so if you happen to see this, you are getting a sneak preview!]

Landed in Paris at 6am. After clearing customs, my first order of business was to see if they had pay showers in the airport someplace. At the very end of this trip, I would be coming straight off living on a sailboat for a week, and thought I’d probably need to clean up. Alas, there was nothing to be found, only perhaps lounges for frequent flyers, which I was in an earlier career, but am not anymore.

Moving on, I navigated the train system to Gare du Nord, then the city blocks past the nearby Gare de l’Est to end up at my little hotel. It was still pretty early in the day and my hotel room wasn’t available, so I dropped off my suitcase, having extracted the camera and map for a day of sightseeing. Bought a SIM card for the mobile phone, texted the new phone number to a couple people, ate some train station food. Hit the pavement!

First up, a stroll past the Canal Saint-Martin, which was just a block east of the hotel, and recommended by my cousin Susann. A beautiful, quiet boulevard, with tourist canals leisurely working their way up and down the canal, through the locks and under the pedestrian bridges.

The Centre Georges Pompidou is the main modern art museum of Paris, and a place I’ve been trying to get to every time I’m in Paris. On this trip it was my highest priority, and I would finally succeed, but not quite yet. I walked up a little before 11am to find A) they weren’t open yet and B) there was a pretty big line. I’d come back later.

South across the Seine to Ile Saint-Louis (the smaller of the two islands in the river), wandered the streets, passed east of Notre Dame (which I’d get closer to later), and came out on the other side of the river on the Left Bank. Made my way up to the Pantheon, a collosal cathedral-like structure that looks like a cathedral but is nonetheless a secular celebration of the notable characters of France’s long history. The interior you are presented with upon entrance is fabulous and ornate and amazing, with astonishing details wherever you look. For example, seemingly tucked in a corner is a huge mural “Death of St. Genevieve” about the patron saint of Paris.

But the real deal is downstairs in the basement, where the remains of dozens of notables lie in what is essentially the national mausoleum of France. Marie and Pierre Curie, Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola … the gang’s all here.

Back down the hill towards the Seine (past some Autolib electric cars) to the Musee de Cluny, the Museum of the Middle Ages. The exhibits were a bit dull (tapestries, ceramics, etc.), and I was admittedly starting to feel the lack of sleep, but the setting was pretty spectacular. Deep within the museum was an entire Roman bath, a huge room with marble everywhere you looked. And on the grounds outside were fabulous gardens, full of lunching Parisians, not just tourists. Great place to stop for lunch, so I did.

Onwards to the gardens of Luxembourg Palace, and an entire section of Paris that I’d never even sped through. Lush landscaping, beautiful architecture, long rows of carefully pruned trees. Took a few pictures for my Dad, who’s a big fan of hedges — and now that I think about it, I don’t believe I ever sent him those pictures, hmmm. Found a quiet spot among the young people (and kids) and took a short nap under partly cloudy skies.

Back north, across the Seine and onto Ile de la Cite and Notre Dame. The famous cathedral was another obvious tourist stop that I’ve attempted multiple times, but the lines are always massive, and they were again today. So I wandered around the outside a bit (had already taken a longer look on a previous trip) and stumbled across … an old battle tank being driven down the street.

Pictured here is the tank on the flatbed truck before, no lie, an older gentleman climbed inside, fired it up, and drove it off the back of the truck, down the street, and straight through an entryway and into the courtyard of the stately old building, perhaps the police headquarters. Who knows! A fairly large crowd had gathered (this was tourist ground zero, right next to Notre Dame) and everyone was pretty incredulous at the surprise event. I got some great video of it. Moving on …

… To a Piper Cub right around the corner. Celebrating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, the display commemorated the moment on August 24th, 1944, the day before the actual liberation, when Leclerc’s approaching resistance forces flew an aircraft just like this one over this spot, dropping leaflets to the police below saying “hold on, we’re coming“.

Finally, Centre Georges Pompidou. The most obvious feature of Renzo Piano’s early career design is that it turns a building inside out — putting major structural and functional elements on the outside of the building, instead of hiding them behind a curtain wall. Rode the iconic escalator up to the museum floors, and spent around two hours poring through everything they had.

Nina Pereg’s 8-minute video “Sabbath” had me transfixed for the duration — longer, actually. It shows a street scene in Jerusalem, where Orthodox Jewish men (boys, actually) move barriers into the street at the beginning of the weekly period of rest.

Stooping through a short tunnel-like entrance led to Joseph Beuys’ “Plight“, a large room lined in thick rolls of felt (Beuys really liked felt) and enclosing a piano.

These are just the two things I happened to take pictures of. There was sooo much.

Grabbed some food someplace, and crashed into bed for my first sleep in 40 hours.

I’m going to Europe! I’ll be on my own this time, as Sharon just could not get away from work, and the trip’s timing is pinned down per the explanations below. The map above sketches out the general plan, taking place over a total of 16 days. I’ll be in Paris for a day, seeing things that I haven’t yet in our previous two visits (Dec 2008 and Sep-Oct 2011). I arrive at 6am, and so will have about 12 hours to do stuff before I collapse right after dinner time. I can’t sleep on airplanes, so this is how I deal with the jet lag — pushing through that first day. The current plan is to see Pompidou Center, Musee de Cluny, Notre Dame and Pantheon, and if time allows I will check out the Luxembourg gardens and Ile Saint-Louis.

The next morning, I get on a train, well a series of trains, that will deposit me in Annweiler, Germany. This is the small town that my family hails from (on my mother’s side), and we are having a family reunion to celebrate the 50th birthday of my cousin Stefan. During my entire freshman year of high school, I lived in this town, going to the local high school with Stefan, so I’m obviously familar with it.

After the festivities, I’m hitching a ride with another cousin and her family back to their home in Heidelberg, overnighting with them and then catching a train the next morning to Geneva.

The main reason for this trip is the sailing, discussed below. The timing is dictated by the family reunion event. However, when planning this I saw that I would obviously need to travel between point A and point B, across the Alps. Looking for an opportunity to do soemthing along the way, I spotted Geneva …

Hmmm, what do I know that’s in Geneva? CERN! The world’s premier particle physics (read: atom smashing) research facility is located just outside Geneva, in a campus that sprawls across the countryside, actually straddling the French and Swiss border. I have been a close follower of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) for years, including keeping up with the construction, the initial “beam on” of Sep 2008, the subsequent shutdown due to failure, startup again, and then most notably the triumphant declaration in July 2012 that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson. These little particles are all rather abstract of course, but think of it this way — the LHC is the simply largest machine humans have ever built.

Anyway, I’m going there. They have public tours, however I don’t know that those tours actually get you down into the underground tunnel or any of the four colossal test chambers. So I’m trying to see if anyone I know knows a guy who knows a guy who can maybe get me in … While I’m there I’ll tool around Geneva for 2-3 days, seeing what there is to see — I haven’t actually planned that out yet! I’m leaving the exact departure day and time up in the air, to be flexible in case someone can get me into the LHC tunnel.

Next, back on a train to the French coast of the Mediterranean and some sailing! As I wrote about last summer, 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 (these pictures are from earlier trips).

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 (2013 was already off the table, I forget why).

Now, I really don’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. We didn’t have much wind, but he and I are both into electric cars so we managed to pass the time 🙂

Sailing is quite a visceral experience, especially if the wind has kicked up. And with that in mind, I really do hope that we get some serious wind. I mean, I’m looking forward to lazing around in the sun, but also to some bare-knuckled tacks and jibes. I don’t think I’m suspectible to seasickness, but I guess I’m going to find out.

I’m not sure I want to captain the boat — I think I’ll be happy to just take orders and move the sails as I’m told. There will be three other people on the boat with Andreas and me — a friend of his, his young son (my cousin) and his son’s girlfriend. I know for a fact that they are all quite experienced at sailing, and so I hope they’ll let me do something besides run the radio.

The tentative plan, shown in this last image, will be to disembark from the home port (Port Camargue) and spend eight days workong our way around towards Corsica and back. I really don’t know much about the plan beyond this map, and am leaving myself at the mercy of Andreas and the others.

At the end of the sailing voyage (or at least my part of it) we will arrive in Marseilles, where I will catch a train back to Paris, straight to the airport and back to Atlanta.

My mother passed away suddenly in October 2006. In a small ceremony in April 2007, we took her cremated remains and set them in the ground around the base of a newly planted magnolia tree in the backyard of her house. The tree produced a single, full bloom the following spring. The next year it burst forth with over forty blooms, and has flourished since then.

If anyone recognizes what kind of magnolia this is, please let me know. I really have no idea. Click on the photos to see larger versions.

The three children (my two sisters and I) inherited the house from Mom, but my younger sister decided to “buy us out” and make it a proper home for her and her growing family. This summer she got promoted to a new job away from New Jersey, and so the house is finally going on the market after nearly 30 years in family hands. My mother actually built this house to her specifications in the mid 80’s, after getting divorced from Dad and shipping my and my older sister off to college. It really is an incredibly unique and well-built house, with lush landscaping.

So my sister and her family are cleaning house and getting ready to move out. I wondered about the memorial magnolia. Could we move a 10-foot tall tree that was nearly a decade rooted into the ground? We consulted with an expert and they advised that while it was possible, and there were techniques for uprooting trees, the truth is that it would likely not survive the move. And then we would have done something even worse — killed the tree, instead of just leaving it there to the fates. So scratch that idea.

Somebody suggested the idea of doing cuttings of the tree, taking small branch tips and rooting them into new pots. Hmmm, that’s interesting. We talked to professionals and it did indeed seem doable; in fact, my research showed that summer is the ideal time to attempt this. I could take multiple cuttings, to improve the odds of getting at least one to take, and the original tree would still be there.

However, there was the matter of transportation. I was going to call up a local pro and hire them to do the cuttings, and then get the results transported somehow after they’d taken root, but I was advised that you can’t really ship plants like this. That may or may not be true. But with other house cleanout activities, it seemed inevitable that my sister would have a car load of things for me to take anyway, so I decided to fly up and drive back. I’d load up the car with the rooted cuttings, and all the other junk, and drive it all down to Atlanta!

And so I commenced with research on exactly what I needed to do to get tree cuttings to root. Besides the obvious method of searching the internet, I got on the phone with plant expert up in that area and he walked me through the process. Actually I had originally wanted to hire them to do it for me, back before I realized that I really needed to do it myself.

On the designated weekend, I flew up and got a good look at the tree — it looked perfectly healthy, if growing a bit oddly. I took one cutting and headed to the local nursery and talked to that expert again (thanks Jeff at Rutgers Nursery!) My original plan had been to to all the potting work in NJ before the drive, but he advised that it would probably be better to just keep the cuttings in water and then do the potting upon arrival.

So on the day of departure, I went out with a ladder to claim some cuttings. I decided to take 12 cuttings, loosely filling a bucket with them, and put a few inches of water in the bucket. I had brought an old plastic spray bottle with me and filled that up with water to mist the leaves during the drive.

The drive back to Atlanta normally takes 13 hours, PLUS stoppage time. I’m old enough that’s it not worth the effort to pull that off in one shot anymore, so I decided to break up the trip with a stop in Washington DC. I’d drive the 3 hours to DC, then the 10 hours to Atlanta.

Of course, I had an ulterior motive, which was to stop at the Smithsonian. There is a new exhibit of some critical components that came out of the Hubble Space Telescope on the final servicing mission by the space shuttle in May 2009, and I had to see them for myself. It was utterly fascinating, and someday soon maybe I’ll do a seperate writeup about it. No, this excellent article from the Smithsonian does as good a job as I would, and the has exact same photos I took.

Onwards! I continued to mist the plants at every stop during the drive, and when I arrived at home late that night. The next day I went out and got some Perlite, rooting hormone and pots, and followed the sequence per all my research and notes. Cut just below the node, peel off all but the top two leaves, cut those two remaining leaves in half (to reduce moisture loss), apply rooting hormone to stem tip, place in pots via pencil starter holes, and then water via misting. Of the original twelve cuttings to come down in the bucket, I picked the six most healthy looking.

As I write this, two weeks later, it doesn’t look good. Of the six cuttings, five look pretty much dead, but one looks OK. The leaves are curled in an odd direction, but it’s holding its own, and I’m hoping that it’s generating roots down there. Per my reaserch, it needs to hang out in the Perlite for five weeks, generating roots in the Perlite, and then I can transfer to a new pot with potting soil. I wish I had more than just one cutting left to pin my hopes on, and I haven’t actually given up on the five dead-looking ones. I just wish I had a better sense of how much watering I should be doing; from my research I got the impression that I really needed to be sparing with the water, which makes me very nervous, especially since I’ve probably killed five of the six so far.

My original hope was to get three cuttings to survive this, so I’d have one for each child (me and my two sisters), but at this point I’ll settle for just one! It’s frankly going to be a minor miracle if this works.

PBS’s Nova documentary series recently re-aired an episode from 2013, that is so good I watched it again, and I’m compelled to write about it here. It’s a special episode called “Earth From Space” is viewable online at this link, for free, and I strongly encourage taking the time to watch it.

Here are some highlights if you can’t watch the whole thing.

0 hours 36 minutes — Antartica and the surrounding ice shelf is a key driver of the global climate. The ice that forms around the continent squeezes out salt (brine), which is denser than the surrounding water, and that cascades down through ocean caverns and along the global sea floor. This brine flow (also known as the haline cycle) drives the flow of water and nutrients ultimately around the planet, in a massive global conveyer belt called the thermohaline circulation cycle.

1h 03m — African Saharan diatomite dust (the remains of ancient plankton) is carried by equatorial winds to the Amazonian rain forest, where it is rained out of the atmospheric, providing much needed phospates to fertilize the basin.

1h 14m — Oxygen in the atmosphere is obviously critical to advanced life forms including mamals like us. Satellite data shows that Earth has a daily “breathing” cycle, where plants receive sunlight during the day and produce oxygen, but also indicates that huge rainforests like the Amazon actually keep most of that oxygen (via reabsorbing at night). Satellite data is showing that the rainforest runoff produces massive plankton blooms, and they consume carbon dioxide and produce oxygen that then finds its way into the atmosphere and is available to the entire planet.

1h 40m — The Sun’s magnetic field and interaction with Earth’s magnetic field, illustrated with fantastic animations (produced by supercomputers) that show the Earth being buffeted by the Sun’s activity. Without our magnetic field, Earth’s atmosphere would slowly get stripped away and the Sun would scorch the Earth. By the way, we now believe that this is what happened to Mars; it once had a magnetic field, which allowed it to have a thicker atmosphere and liquid water on the surface (implying life), but the magnetic field disappeared and the planet was transformed into the frigid, dry wasteland that our probes are exploring today.

1h 47m — Finally, satellite data is revealing how much human activity is now dwarfing Earth’s natural cycles. Our growing presence is now starting to interrupt natural processes that have evolved over billions of years. Nitrates from lightning, sulfur from volcanoes, dust from the deserts –all of these sources are now already completely overtaken and dwarfed by human industrial activity.

The difference between the natural processes and our own is that we make conscious decisions about what we do.