360 Degrees Longitude by John Higham Read Free Book Online Page A

campground had once been.
    â€œIt’s time to splurge,” September declared. “Let’s find a hostel.”
    France being the way it is, by the time we were settled in our hostel all of the stores were closed. Dinner became leftovers from lunch, and breakfast held all the promise of the vending machines in the lobby. But the hostel held a reward.
    Unless you have been cycling all day, it is hard to understand the lure of a nice shower. Long before we got to Caen we began rating campgrounds solely by the quality of this three-minute experience. There is the drippy shower, more of a leaky faucet than a proper shower. There is also the one-size-fits-all shower, which has a non adjustable water temperature. Last, but not least, is the dreaded timed shower, operating off a token whose timing is unpredictable. These three types can be combined, but the nadir shower experience is the insult-to-injury shower: a combination of all three where you get to pay for a token, and get no water pressure or heat in return, only to have what water flow there is cut off while you have shampoo in your hair.
    Our hostel in Caen had showers in which we could actually adjust the temperature to whatever we liked. Is that a novel concept, or what? To top it off, we could let the water run as long as we wanted. To clinch the experience, the hostel had chairs right there in our room . Sheer decadence.
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    I thought the French were all beside themselves with disgust at the thought of a theme park with mouse ears. As we entered Festyland we saw that its theme was William the Conqueror and the events of the year 1066!
    â€œWhat’s with the Viking war ships and weapons?” I asked September. “I thought the French were pacifists.”
    â€œAnd I thought the theme of the park was the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Last time I checked, there weren’t any Vikings there.”
    The gears in my brain jammed at that comment; I would need to consult Wikipedia to drink from the fountain of knowledge.
    Later that night at an Internet café I learned there is a Viking connection with the year 1066. My spin on it is that Festyland was purposely built by the French to torment the English. One of the most brutal chapters in English history came to a close on September 25, 1066, when a king of one of the many disparate fiefdoms in England defeated the occupying Vikings once and for all at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Exactly nineteen days later was the Battle of Hastings when William the Conqueror (who was French, remember) defeated the English and became what modern Britons call their first king.
    So, just about the time the picnics were winding down in celebration of the end of centuries of tyranny and Viking oppression, the French showed up and one of them declared himself king. A thousand years later, they still haven’t left. Festyland, with its half-Viking, half-William the Conqueror theme, is France’s way of reminding the world that the British have had only nineteen days of sovereignty in the last millennium.
    Â 
    John’s Journal, June 29
    Jordan and Katrina have become the very best of friends. They were close before we left, but now that they have no one else they have become very tight .
    Anyway, the old saying is that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I guess that applies to relationships, too. All this togetherness could tear us apart, but so far, it hasn’t. That can only be a good thing, right?
    Speaking of family togetherness, one of the problems with all this quality time is that there are no opportunities to get away from each other. This was, of course, known beforehand. But it becomes more “personal” when there really isn’t an opportunity for two consenting adults, to, well, consent. Before we embarked on this endeavor, September and I talked about this very problem, and didn’t come up with a satisfying solution. We hoped something, or some