Day 51: Savigny Switzerland to Clarafond, France

September 7, 2013

We rode into the dark and set up the tent by a cornfield, in the rain. You may see some unlabelled photos below, but the story of our visit to CERN will have to wait for a while.

... ok, this is the CERN story: From the vines high above Satigny, we descended over the roads we had climbed the night before. We now understood well where CERN was, and backtrack or not we were determined to go there. Jens, the CERN librarian that we had met in Satigny, told us that there were tours, beginning at 9. So for sure we would be there at 9!

Our camp in the vines. Getting up early so as not to miss CERN.

Before this day, I was uncertain as to whether CERN was a place, where high energy nuclear physics is studied, or whether it was an acronym. CERN is an acronym, for the French version of Council for European Nuclear Research, although it is now called an "Organization" so the acronym not longer matches the name. CERN, though, could be a place or town, since it is a huge campus with internal streets, named after physicists.

CERN was established soon after WWII, as a way of stemming the brain drain to the USA. It is also directed toward peaceful research, an important change from the nuclear weapon research the war. The main focus of CERN is nuclear particle research. The main game is to accelerate protons and cause them to collide. Huge and sophisticated detectors then observe the particles that result from the collisions. Given Einstein's e=mc^2 equation, you need lots of energy to get any matter, so CERN is into high energy and wings those protons around very fast.

CERN started with a small cyclotron in 1957, but by 2009 had built the LHC - Large Hadron Collider. This is a 27 km ring installed underground with one point at Meyrin, near the Geneva airport, where we were, and the ring extending between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountains, in France. While the accelerator ring and feeder rings are pretty major, the really big parts are the detectors, with ATLAS at Meyrin and CMS directly across the ring.There are two others. ALICE and LHCb. ATLAS is said to be the biggest, most complex thing ever built by man.

We could not see ATLAS directly, since it is underground and sealed away from even insiders. But we stood by the surface control room, and had a virtual tour via 3D movie. The control room also had live webcams from below the surface.

Our CERN experience began outside the locked door, since we were early. So first step, I tried to break into the computer system. No luck. Duh. Also, there is no public wifi there. This is a bit of a quirk, since in 1990 Tim Berners-Lee CERN is acknowledged as having invented the World Wide Web as a way of sharing CERN data among researchers. I later chided our guide, who works in the data processing department and volunteers for guiding on the weekend, about this. His fairly reasonable reply was that they have serious work to do, and no time for getting tourists (even Grampies) onto Facebook, or whatever.Even so, I took pleasure in connecting to an outside power plug and sucking energy from CERN. The computer seemed to think it was "good stuff".

Aside from the tour and opportunity to ask a real CERN worker questions, there were several small museums. Most of the information, really geared toward the non-scientist, was still gobbledygook to us. It's all about the four forces (gravitational, weak, electromagnetic, and strong) and their carrier particles, gravitons, bosons, photons, and gluons. There is also the theory of the Higgs Field, and for some reason, the search for the Higgs Boson has to do with testing this theory. Testing this theory seems to be the Big Thing. So when this year, CERN announced that they had found the Higgs Boson, they were really beside themselves.

Since all this is so clearly beyond us, why would we go off route and even backtrack to get there? First, it's because it's a world centre of knowledge, and we value knowledge almost above all. Second, it's because of the interest Dodie's dad had in this stuff (not to mention that he was German and looked exactly like Einstein) and we wanted to come for him. Finally, there is our favourite TV show, the Big Bang Theory. It's amazing how many of the references from that show are found at CERN, reflecting the show's use of real physics consultants. So that includes the Big Bang itself, the obsession with the Nobel prize, the use of acronyms, and the references to the ancient Greeks as they attempt to teach us "a little physics".

Some of the books in the CERN gift shop.

They have a handout that explains this equation. Arthur, this is yet another mouse pad that we did not get for you!

CERN representation of the Big Bang as a popular concept.

This plasma chamber is being controlled by the grounding provided by Dodie's hand

From a photo of one of the underground machines

Dodie and some new friends, Roos and Endiean, at CERN.

CERN needs vast computer power. They are using banks of PCsand I think this fellow said they generate 1% of the world's data. I foolishly asked our guide whether Linux came from here. Of course, Linus Torvalds was from Helsinki. However a version of Linux is used as the main OS here at CERN.

The objectives of CERN. CERN claims credit, for example, in development of the PET scanner.

Our guide and patient question answerer, Gregory. Originally from Poland, he was trained in England.

Surprisingly there is not a lot of commercial services immediately near CERN, and certainly no CERN snack bar, onsite Starbucks, or whatever.

However, down the road there was a standalone Indian restaurant. Dodie went in to see what she could drum up, while I looked at the menu posted outside. At about 40 chf per person, this was real Swiss pricing. I figured Dodie would just give it a pass, but she emerged with butter chicken, rice, naan, and lentils. Actually, we did have chf to get rid of, since hopefully soon we would pass into France.

The Indian food gave us strength, and we motored along well for a while, though there were several push the bike hills. At this time, some Via Rhona signs popped up, but quickly disappeared. Via Rhona signage absolutely can not be relied on to keep you on the Via Rhona, at least not in this region. Finally, at the town of Valleiry, we came to an intersection that was unmarked, except for some D route numbers and the names of some towns we couuld not find on the maps we had. I suggested we needed a better map, not to mention a grocery and a bakery. Dodie (at this point) was not totally exhausted, but she was ticked with the Via Rhona people, whoever they might be. She said "Fine then, go find those", with that she pulled out one of our stools and went a bit on strike.

I gambled on the right turn, and almost immediately came to a grocery, spotted a man carrying a telltale baguette (you can project baguette trails backward in France, to their source bakeries!), and a Tabagie/News store. So I quickly returned with all three items. We had just actually entered France, and characteristicallyor the proud french, the grocery refused to accept any Swiss francs. At the bakery, though, they were still ok.

At the next town, a cryptic note in our fairly lame Via Rhona guide book said turn left at the "entrance" to town. We coursed back and forth a few times, looking for which left turn might be intended, then selected one and ended up climbing up into the vines. We retreated. and fired up the darn GPS. It turned out we had to turn left there, alright, and then make an immediate right, the wrong way down a one way lane. Ok fine, but it cost us over a half hour. grrr.

By now it was approaching evening and it looked like rain. We had targeted a camping about 10 km further on. By now, though, it was raining. Dodie did spot a shed in a field and we checked it out, but ruled it too small. So we pushed on. We could always wild camp if we did not reach the official camping, right? Wrong. The road now swung around a mountain, or rather on a mountain. There was a cliff to our left and a cliff to our right. All we could do was push on, and push we did, because it was quite steeply uphill.

Example of our artistic, lame, Via Rhona guide book maps

Finally the road levelled a bit, and we stopped into a restaurant to ask about the camping.They said it was some kms ahead, but had been closed for some time. So now we searched more closely for a good wild camp site. With darkness coming, we finally just grabbed a spot in a wood beside a corn field. Only thing, it was now raining quite steadily. So we did our put up the tent from the outside in (i.e. fly up first) in the dark trick. This helps, but when the tent is finally up, you are still outside in soaking wet clothes with soaking wet bags.

One way or another we got inside. Only then did Dodie announce she had to pee. Necessity is the mother of invention, and Dodie now invented a way for a girl to pee out a tent, without leaving its shelter. The further details of this technology are confidential!

Now the rain became a thunderstorm, with brilliant flashes of lightening. Sheesh.

Up the mountain as evening and rain approaches

Looking up at a strange castle on a hillside

Looking way down now at a bridge over the river

A village below us. Finally we descended enough to find a corn field to camp in.

Today's ride: 48 km (30 miles)
Total: 3,382 km (2,100 miles)

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