Fontainebleau Post I Forgot to Title

New country, new traffic jam. I'm typing this as we're stuck on the road between Andorra and Barcelona. Nevertheless, this post is about...

Friday, April 10, 2009

Today we didn't have any shopping to do in the morning, but we did need to try and find internet access to figure out weather in Siurana and Fontainebleau for the next week, and decide whether we should bother driving south. So, we headed to the nearby town of Barbizon, a cool artists' town, to see whether there were any networks we could access. We found an open one that seemed to cover at least part of the town, and signed on.

The weather was up in the air, so we emailed Daddy asking for advice. We also looked at hotel options for Andorra to see whether there would be anywhere to stay. After that, we headed back to the campground to gather up our climbing gear.

Today, we climbed at Rocher du Potala, trying red and blue circuit problems. We didn't do anything particularly hard, and it was a new area for both Nick and me. We saw several lizards, as well as a few little rooms built under boulders (complete with fireplaces). Nick and I didn't really know what was going on with those.





















Meanwhile, I was really tired for a lot of the day.



Eventually, it started to sprinkle some, and I got increasingly nervous about downpours, so I started encouraging Nick to head back in the general direction of the car. So we decided to try a few red circuit problems at Rocher Guichot, since that was right next to where our car was parked.

We tried a 6A that Nick said he had done before, problem 6 on the red circuit, but couldn't figure it out.











After only a couple tries, though, I saw the obvious heel hook, so I sent. Then Nick did too. It was really actually a quite easy problem for 6A, probably because it was more about power than technique, so the French find it hard.



I then did the climb several more times so that I could get photo and video documentary.









I was also quite pleased to hear a cuckoo bird in the forest -- at first I thought it was an actual cuckoo clock.

Not long after that, though, it started to rain for real, and Nick and I dashed to the car. We went quickly back to the campground, and then decided to head back into Barbizon to make a final decisions about when, and if, to leave Fontainebleau.

We ended up deciding that we would leave for Andorra on Sunday morning, giving us one more climbing day in Fontainebleau, and then tried to head back to the campground to cook dinner. Trouble!

We had stopped the car, but left the netbook charging and battery running, because Nick claimed he had a strong car battery that could handle that. It could, but Nick didn't count on having accidentally left the car lights on, as well. (I'm still not sure why they were on; it wasn't close to dark yet.) Problematically, we were parked on the side of a residential street in this rural/suburban town miles from the campground, and I didn't know how to get a jump-start in French. Plus, Nick said that we needed a big car to jump off of, because his car is a diesel that has a slightly bigger battery than petrols of the same size -- and his car is a station wagon, so it isn't tiny to start with.

The good news was that Nick has some crazy AAA-type coverage called Green Flag that is good all throughout Europe. So he called in and spoke to an English person, who then called up a random French garage they were partnered with. So, in about 45 minutes, a big tow-truck with a French driver showed up.

It took a second or two to indicate that we really just needed a jump-start, but when the French guy tried to start the car he saw what was going on. Meanwhile, I was trying to wave Nick's jumper cables around to get the point across, which both Nick and the French driver thought was funny.

He got the car started quickly, and told us to let it run for a bit before actually starting to drive. But then the tricky part started. He was trying to copy down all our information for forms, and apparently he wanted some registration papers for the car. But the problem is that, in England, you are never supposed to drive with those papers in the car, and in France you are only supposed to drive with those papers in the car. Of course. So Nick hadn't thought of this, and his papers were still in England. He eventually communicated this to the French guy, who pretty much gave up at this point rather than try to continue to get the papers from us, so he let us go. Finally we headed back to the campsite.

The good news was that the rain had stopped ages ago by this point, so cooking dinner would be easy. The bad news was that the drained battery had reset Nick's radio, which has an anti-theft device built in where, if it has been disconnected, you can't use the radio (or the CD player) until you enter a code into it -- which Nick didn't have in his car. Which meant we had no radio, at least until we could get one of Nick's housemates to find it and text it to us (which wouldn't happen for a while). We couldn't even hook the iPod up to the netbook to play it because I hadn't brought the appropriate cable. So this was bad news with all the driving we had coming up.

Cooking dinner was easy, though, even thought it was fairly late by this point. Then I experimented with the low showers that had been recommended to me the night before.

The low showers were just booths that opened up to the outside, rather than to the inside of a building (unlike the high showers). They each had their own light that needed to be pushed again about every 60 seconds. Likewise, the showers also had to be pushed about every 58 seconds (I spent a good amount of time racing them). So I had to keep the headlamp on the whole time in the shower for the various button-pressing I had to do. The shower was reasonably warm, which was good, but the water-pressure was pretty low -- instead of coming out of the showerhead in the straight line along which it was angled, it sort of drooped straight out, down to the floor. But the showerhead was fairly high up, so at least it built up a little pressure.

So that was our Friday! The campsite was getting increasingly crowded by this point since more and more people were showing up for Easter weekend, and there were people like practically camping right on top of us at this point (Daddy would have had a hissy), but we were doing okay.

Who is HAL?

A few interesting news stories. First, IBM is building a robot to compete on Jeopardy. Pretty neat, because the Jeopardy questions are pretty tricky to comprehend. As the article pointed out,

The real difficulty, Dr. Nyberg said, is not searching a database but getting the computer to understand what it should be searching for.

The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed.

Which brings me to my second news story. Wolfram|Alpha is launching soon, and there's a little review/explanation of it here. (Apparently there is also a "sneak preview" at HLS today -- wish I could go.) Like the IBM Jeopardy computer, Wolfram|Alpha is supposed to answer your questions with a bit more context than the standard Google keyword search. It also apparently is better at presentation than just presenting you with a list of links. As the article explains,

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its "search" results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

I'm not sure how generally useful it will be, but I think it's a good idea and a step in the right direction -- we really need more than the keyword-search functionality that is basically all most search providers offer.

One thing that I'm kind of interested in how often Alpha's database, which apparently comes from "a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources," is updated (and how automated the updating is). The article didn't really address this. If there were 93 internet users in the Vatican City back in 2006, and that's the most recently available data, that doesn't really tell us anymore useful information about the current state of things than Google would. And it seems like if the updating isn't automated, keeping the search engine going would be a pretty big task. But it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Adventures in Sunny Fontainebleau

Thursday, April 9, 2009

I didn't sleep that well this night because Nick was getting over a cold and kept snotting, plus there were some really loud birds making lots of sounds in the morning (Nick said they were crows). Plus I was probably still kind of jetlagged.

In the morning, Nick and I needed to go to the Carrefour, a big "hypermarché," to get food and a deck of cards, since we hadn't remembered to bring one. That ended up taking quite a while. We also picked up camping chairs. At the Carrefour checkout, Nick told me to explain to the cashier that we had an old Carrrefour "bag for life" (a heavy-duty plastic bag that costs like ten cents originally and that you can exchange for a new one for free when it gets worn out) that we wanted to trade for a new one. So the cashier looked like he understood what we were trying to do with the bags until I started talking. Then he looked confused. But he eventually got it after I kept blabbering for a while. That sort of thing happens to me in English, too, so I wasn't too concerned.

We finally ate breakfast (at lunchtime) and headed off to the boulders. We climbed at the 91.1 area, mostly trying red circuit problems. I tried out my new Red Chili shoes, which were okay, but not fantastic or anything. They turned my feet yellow. But they will tide me over until the Speedsters come out in America. I did a few 5Cs at 91.1 (including some high ones), but no 6As. Nick did manage one high 6A, which was good. Nick also found a lot of lizards, which made him happy.













































We both tried Flipper, a well-known 6A that Nick has done before, but neither of us sent. It had huge tickmarks today.





The weather was warm and sunny all afternoon, which was nice. I even borrowed Nick's sunglasses for a problem because I claimed I couldn't do it because I couldn't see anything because the sun was blinding me (but I still couldn't do it with the sunglasses).



By late afternoon, we were pretty tired and headed back to the campsite. I took a shower to de-yellowify my feet while Nick started dinner, and although it was only about 6pm, the shower was cold again. It was fairly hot outside by this point, and the building the showers were in was warm, so it wasn't too bad, but I wasn't thrilled. Meanwhile, though, while Nick and I were eating dinner, the English guy camping next to us (who had the same tent as Nick -- only newer) came over to talk to us, and he told us that the showers in the lower block were still hot. I hadn't tried these lower showers because they're not as nice, the water pressure is lower, and they're not open during the off season (so I thought they might be closed), but Nick decided to try those out later. It turned out that he had a warm (but low-pressure) shower, so I decided that I would go for those the next night.

By the way, during dinner, Nick and I found a really weird strawberry (well, I thought it was really weird, anyways). I guess it's to be expected now that the EU has deregulated fruit shape (although it appears that the ugly-fruit-shape-ban isn't going to be lifted until July 1 -- so does this mean that this strawberry is being counted as non-ugly?).





We played cards for a little while before going to bed. The cards were "Format Français," which turned out to mean that Kings were Rs (Rois), Queens were Ds (Dames), Jacks were Vs (not sure what that one stood for), and Aces were 1s. Which was fun.

So that turned out to be the best weather day of the first Fontainebleau segment of our trip, and I felt like I climbed well, even though I didn't really climb hard.

Europe Trip -- Day 1 of Many

At the moment I'm typing this, we are driving (in a traffic jam) from Fontainebleau to Andorra on Easter Sunday. But I'll blog about my days on my France and Spain trip in order (plus, who knows when this will get posted).

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Today, we woke up at 8am (after I was packing until about 1am) to get ready to go. Everything was stacked up in our house, but we had to get it out to the car. It was sunny while we were packing, so that was all fine.

We left Cambridge around 9:30am, and headed straight to Dover. We were booked on the 2pm ferry, and were hoping to make it onto the earlier 12pm ferry instead. However, when we arrived around 11:30, there was a long line at the French immigration in Dover (for once they were actually checking passports) and we figured we would never make it. I got a stamp in my passport from the French, which made Nick huffy (he doesn't think it's fair that I get so many stamps). However, when we gave the ferry people our ticket at about 11:50, they still put us on the 12pm ferry. Success!

So although the ferry definitely left England on the late side, we were at least on the earlier one. The ride itself was uneventful and I slept during some of it. It was kind of bumpy for the first part of the ride, but got smoother as we got closer to France.





The next three or so hours of driving in France along highways were pretty uneventful. It did start raining quite a bit at one point, but it eventually cleared up before we got to Paris. There were also a few road repairs going on, and in France, they close down whole sections of highways rather than only a few lanes., and redirect traffic onto the whole other side of the highway with a makeshift barrier between you and oncoming cars. Which is a little weird, but you do get a Frogger road sign to show you what is going on (it's animated!).



When we got to the Périphérique, though, things slowed down a lot. We spent about an hour sitting in traffic all around Paris. We didn't get to Fontainebleau until just after 8pm, which made us nervous about getting dinner and camping. We attempted to go to a supermarket, but it was closed when we got there, so instead we found a small open épicerie in the town of Milly-la-Forêt. Well, I think it was supposed to close at 8, but the guy in there let us in anyways.

Next, we had to get camping. We went back to the La Musardière campsite that we had stayed at before. Apparently, the main office closed at 7:30, but I made Nick knock on the door until a cranky guy got up from his nap and let us pay (which is necessary to get the card that opens the gate). So we made it to the campsite and ate dinner. We also set up the tent, and I was helpful with assembling the tent poles (my favorite job).

The only issue was that the showers were cold. There were a lot of people speaking French and German who were also fussing about the showers. So I was really pretty quick in the shower before we went to bed.

So that was our Wednesday. Stay tuned for more!