One of our favorite walking beachesLast month was a little trying. While doing our yearly ritual of bottling of hard cider, I managed to injure a knee sufficiently to need X-rays, 10 days on crutches and some idle talk of surgery. In the end, anti-inflammatory meds and serious goofing off cured what found its root cause in too many candles on the birthday cake. To be clear here…this was an alcohol related injury, not an alcohol induced injury… The fun was immediately followed by a tag team bout of a hum dinger case of the flu for both Janice and I, then I rounded it out by my getting an ear infection. I seriously considered climbing into bed and not getting up till April.
Next, I was sent to the doctor for a no longer to be ignored case of snoring. At home, the issue has been decribed as sleeping with someone who has a big mouth. Of course the scientific medical term is called having the little flappy thing that meets the nasal passage at the back of the throat vibrate and make noise when I breathe while sleeping. Corrective surgery will probably occur next month. Relax; 'The Epistle' will not become a blow by blow litany of our latest aches and pains.
Temporarily recovered, we decided to put our big boy drinking pants on and go adventuring. Our first stop was to visit our Radome nearby. A Radome, which I am guessing is the French way of saying ‘Radar Dome’ is the world’s largest space communications antenna at 100 ft (34 m) high, 150 ft wide (54m) housed in a 210 ft. (64m) diameter Dacron protective weather umbrella. This 340 ton receiver in not under a solid framed domed enclosure, but rather inside this massive inflated balloon that has been pressurized since it was first built in 1962.
Antenna inside the dome. Note small door in the middle of the picture.
If the pressure is ever lost, the entire outer skin would collapse over the antenna. Now classed as a French monument, it was linked with its US sister antenna (until we dismantled ours in the US) and permitted the first direct TV, radio and telephone communications between America and Europe via the Telstar satellite launched by NASA in 1962. In 1970, the world’s first digital telephone switching exchange station became operational in adjacent Perros- Guirec, where to this day the town remains an important R&D communications development center in France.
Enough technology already, time for a history fix!
I have often written about all the cool WWI and II stuff we have stumbled across here and there. Cemeteries, old bunkers, The Maginot line, museums galore and of course the Normandy beaches. Never leaving Brittany, this month we took a day trip the city of Lorient to visit the WWII German U boat submarine base. In 1940 the Germans decided to build 5 bases (2 in Brittany) for their wolf packs in their battle of the Atlantic, to prevent supplies and troops arriving from the USA to Britain.
German submarine pens
The Keroman base was designed to house thirty U-boats and their crews and was both the largest and most intricate of all the U-boat bases in France as well as the largest military fortress in Europe. Being assigned to one of the 168 submarines that operated out of here meant near certain death as 135 of them were eventually sunk.
The project was so massive that they had to build a new rail line to bring in sufficient sand and gravel to pour the 1 million cubic meters of concrete (¼ of all the cement produced in France for the German projects) to build the complex with the 21 foot (7 M) thick roofs to protect them from allied bombs. Only a few ‘Talboy’ bombs succeeded in breaking through. Not succeeding in destroying the facility, the allies dropped leaflets over the city to warn the residents to leave, then proceeded to bomb the place into the Stone Age to destroy all support facilities.
Inside one of the empty pens
Once the war ended, the site became the main French submarine base before closing in 1997. Facing a $41 million (31 million Euros) cost to remove the concrete hulk, the city chose the textbook approach of making lemonade out of lemons. They turned it into a museum housing the oldest submarine rescue simulator, as well as a tri-hull fabrication and maintenance facility for world class racing vessels.
Fabricating a 138 foot (42m) tall mast for a trimaran like the one below
Note size of man on left deck
Local lore...
We picked a sunny warm day and set off with our village friends Philippe and Evelyn to go explore the last remaining slate quary in Brittany. One of the things that so attracted Janice and I to the area when we purchased our house here was the architecture of old stone homes with their slate roofs. The entire region is awash with slate roofs. As special it is to us, its run of the mill stuff here. The better quality locally produced slate is up to an inch thick ( 2.5 cm). Slowly it is being replaced with cheaper slate produced in Spain, and amazingly to me, in Quebec Canada.
Splitting the slab
I always thought the layers ran horizontaly, but found that here at least they ran vertically. The quary is surface mined and a lone 'splitter' remains. [ The guy who spilts the layers of slate from the larger slabs then trims them down to size] When he retires in a few years, an era will have passed and the high quality rust colored slate seen on Cathedrals, government buildings and high end homes will no longer be available from Brittany.
Finished piece, ready to roof
Then we have science…
Iodine was discovered in 1811 by French chemist Bernard Courtois in Brittany, France. The element occurs primarily in seawater and in solids formed when seawater evaporates. Its most important property is the ability to kill germs and it is used in antiseptics, germicides, and other medical applications along with many other less common, but important, commercial applications.
Courtois and his father collected seaweed on the coast of Brittany, and then they burned it. They soaked the seaweed ashes in water to dissolve the sodium and potassium compounds and added sulfuric acid to react with the unwanted seaweed chemicals. Finally, they allowed the water to evaporate, leaving the white crystals, much like ordinary table salt. The compounds were sold to large industrial businesses for use in such products as table salt and baking soda.
One day in 1811, Courtois made a mistake and added too much sulfuric acid to the mixture. He saw clouds of violet vapor rising from the mixture and eventually, proved it was a new element naming it after its color. In Greek, the word iodes means "violet."
And finally folklore…
Jules Verne (Around the world in 80 days, 20,000 leagues under the sea) was born and lived in Brittany. We are pretty picky. You didn’t think we would live any old where, did you?
After hanging the kids refridgerator art for years, the tables are turned.
Mom painting a little something for Kami
