55 - Hither and Thither - Castets & Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains
Tuesday, April 2 - Castets
Today was a busy day. Not only was there a lot to do at work, but there was plenty to do in the evening too:
In preparation for an important meeting in the afternoon, I spent much of the day gathering .CSV data and plotting it to make sense of the previous week's equipment test. It was close but I managed to make it work and I think I got my point across. More testing will be needed to prove my hypothesis but getting approval for more testing was the goal for this meeting and on that front we succeeded.
After work, I had a few errands to run. First, I stopped by a bottle shop to grab some souvenir wines for the folks back home. I selected a red wine from Capbreton, a red Irouleguy, and a sweet white dessert wine from Sauternes. Second, I picked up the hemmed pants I'd bought before the long weekend; I was impressed with how smoothly the whole thing went and was pleased with the resulting pantalons.
Third, I needed to touch base with the hotel manager, Jerome, to sort out my bill and checkout arrangements. Since I'd be leaving early in the morning (somewhere between 4-5 AM) he informed me that I could leave the key as I'd found it (in the interior-side door lock) and that he'd leave the parking lot gate open so I could exit. After paying my bill, Jerome was super kind and gave me two more bottles of wine to take home!
Souvenirs to be packed!
With that taken care of, I had only enough energy to munch on some bread for dinner. I'll have to save packing for tomorrow evening; fingers crossed my bottles of wine don't make the suitcase too heavy 🤞
Wednesday, April 3 - Castets & Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains
It was a long but good day at work. We dove straight into more equipment testing and I think it was worth the day. We learned a few limits on the equipment, items to review, as well as how to startup faster. I learned that cats "ronronner" in French since I'd tried to compare the noise of a specific pump to the purr of a kitten. Towards the end of the day, there were a few goodbyes at the office, but I'll be back for April 15 so no "au revoirs" but simply "à bientots".
The weather was really nice and would continue to do so into the evening, so I popped by the beach to profite du soleil. I wanted to check out a beach I hadn't yet visited in les Landes and thus I ended up in the small community of Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains. Due to the Spanish holiday, there was actually a decent number of people in town and on the beach (though I'm sure this was just a pale imitation of what peak summer crowding looks like). The beach itself was pretty nice but I'm not sure what cause the sand I was walking on the be ...squeeky? Every few steps, I would hear the sand make a high-pitched whine as the top layer twisted beneath/around my feet.
There was a slight haze effect from water vapor in the sunlight but a very enjoyable beach afternoon all the same.
✌
Still a bit of time till sunset
Walking south along the coast, I encountered a protected outlet demarking the end of Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains' beach. I followed this stream inland and discovered a mixed-water lake whose shores were littered with oyster shells (in some spots reminiscent of the opening scene of Terminator, the Oysternator?). Anyhow, with the sun beginning to set, I decided to have dinner at a restaurant on the lakeshore and enjoy the warm air.
I ended up having dinner and a show: some sort of cormorant was fishing just in front of me and snagged a pretty large fish. It took a few minutes to get the fish tired/disoriented enough that the bird could throw it back and down the hatch. After that, the bird took a good 2 minutes bobbing its head to get the meal all the down. Afterwards, the bird continued to hunt but didn't seem to have much success.
My fish were significantly easier to eat and much less head bobbing involved
I'm not the best with breeds but I can confidently say that, since I'm in France, this is a French bulldog
After dinner, I took a walk through the quiet town towards my car before returning to Dax. I guess in summertime one could expect to find Vieux-Bocau-les-Bains to be quite busy at night, but not just yet. Once back at home base, I packed my bags and set an early alarm the flight home.
It was a well-lit but quiet walk through condos and past closed stores.
The distinction between road and sidewalk blurred in some areas
The dune is our friend for life!
There were a lot of cats hanging out under streetlights tonight
Public toilets just before the dune to the beach, not a bad system
Thursday, April 4 - Newark
I woke up and got out the apartment before 5. I
plugged in the address for a Le Clerc gas station only to discover the
supply of E5 E10 to all its pumps was busted. Another nearby station wouldn't read
my credit cards, so I ended up returning the vehicle with only a 1/4
tank; something about even the best laid plans...
My flight to CDG was quick; I slept for the first half and attempted but didn't succeed to sleep the 2nd half. My previous exiting flight from BIQ had included a gorgeous view of the Biarritz beach during take-off but I completely missed it due to being asleep 😅
À la prochaine, BIQ!
Ah, here's why I had trouble sleeping the 2nd half hour of the hopper flight.
In CDG, I had time to use my laptop to answer a few emails I didn't get to last night. I grabbed a small bite at a restaurant called EXKI, the kid ahead of me in the food line had heard they accepted dollars in addition to Euros, to his surprise it was only US dollars not Canadian dollars. Poor fella, I think he was really looking for a way to break his $100 bill.
Is it donjon like a dungeon or donjon like a castle tower?
Not sure which island this is but I think it's just past Brest
A little snack on the plane, a petit beurre
From CDG to EWR, I mostly watched movies. First was the new 3 Musketeers (Part 2 Milady), then Nope, Three Thousand years of Longing, and afterwards I rewatched most of Everything Everywhere All at Once.
- The 3 Musketeers was in French with French subtitles; it's part 2 of what might be 3 or 4 movies and it made me realize that I don't remember anything from those books, much less why Eva Green was trying to seduce D'Artagnan 😂.
- Nope was interesting and I thought the point raised about how we think about the first moving picture was poignant. I switched back and forth between English and French audio but I settled on English since I don't think the context and meaning of "nope" was fully conveyed by a nasally "non".
- I really liked 3,000 Years of Longing. I used French audio with English subtitles and was hooked from the start. There was a moment of a vignette involving concubines and I became acutely aware of the young boy seated next to me as copulous amounts of flesh were briefly on display. Fortunately, he fell asleep (or had the wherewithal to feign sleep) and I was able to get through that scene and finish the film.
And with that, I was back states-side. Arriving back in EWR instead of JFK made for a much simpler return home but passport control at EWR was so much slower that it took me about 2 hours to get to the office and retrieve my car. I guess experiencing such a delay made it easy to decide to skip working in the afternoon (it was basically quitting time) but I had a nice chat with the security guard before heading home. In the evening, I managed to stay awake enough to see friends and play a few board games but I would be sleeping very well.
Friday, April 5 - Newark
I slept well but my internal clock must be set somewhere over the Atlantic; this worked to my advantage as I needed to get into the office fairly early to receive a colleague from Geneva. I'd met her virtually many times and in-person in Castets for this project so I was more than happy to help set up a site visit for her. She was taking vacation with her family to New York and wanted to pop in to visit the facility; kudos to her, I'm not so sure I'd take a morning of my vacation to visit an affiliate.
When initially discussing the possibility of a site visit, she'd told me she'd be staying with friends in Jersey City and I offered to take the extra 5-10 minutes from my commute to pick her up. Turns out, she was staying in Long Island City (I can see where the confusion might come from) in Queens, so she took an Uber/cab instead. Due to lunch plans in Manhattan, she could only stay on-site for a few hours, so we made them count as best we could.
After doing the rounds in the office to say hi to people and see the labs, we donned our PPE and I took her for a visit of the plant with a focus on the process that we'd both been helping to startup in Castets. We were up on the 4th floor of the workshop and I was showing her a few tanks whose counterparts in France we'd spent many hours discussing when suddenly there was a loud noise. The building budged for a second or two and I could see pipes bouncing up & down and tanks on legs swaying; given its abruptness I figured it must've been a truck scored a glancing blow on the building. And so I tried to continue with the tour but the rest of the group was more interested in returning to ground level.
Once we made it into the control room, we learned that there had just been an earthquake (un tremblement de terre)! It figures that her first earthquake and solar eclipse would be during a visit to New York City 😅. Once out of the field, she checked in with her family; turns out her kids were playing on a soccer field and didn't even realize there'd been an earthquake 🤣
The rest of the day went by smoothly for me. More catchup discussions with people in the office; I ended up staying a bit late trying to get a calculation done but gave up on it when I realized my eyes weren't registering what was happening on my screen. I'd wanted to crunch the numbers and respond to someone because I will be out of office April 8 & 9 to view the eclipse with friends in upstate New York. Once I'm back in the office April 10, I'll have to check in with my colleagues in France to confirm if they'll want me back on-site April 15th or not; there could be a lot of jet leg in store for me in the coming weeks.
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