So.... the first day of our travel to Spain is over. And, most important, in the end it was quite successful, although we had a lot of problems in the beginning, AND altough we nearly got lost in the Champagne by the end of the day. ;-)
But lets start at the beginning. We managed to leave the MPI exactly at 12:00 UTC.
For those of you not familiar with UTC: people working in science are always a little bit confuse, so they actually GET CONFUSED quite a lot, especially if it comes to time. Therefore, they INVENTED UTC, the Coordinated Universal Time (don't ask me why it's UTC and not CUT, must be some french reason), which is actually identical wis GMT, the Greenwich Mean Time, besides the fact UTC doesn't have daylight saving.
Soon after we left, we encountered the first problems. Our mass spectrometer (a very expensive piece of, hmmm, lets say, "scientific instrumentation", worth a family home, but most times not nearly as useful) crashed, the software of the CPC (an instrument which counts the number of particles in air) produced continuosly errors, and finally our air condition broke down. As you might imagine, our mood dropped. But after a couple of stops we managed to fix these "infancy" problems. And for a while everything was amazingly working perfect. ;-)
Above, you can see MOLA standing in front of our hotel.
When dawn approached, we started to search for a place to rest. Nowadays, such fancy things like GPS devices exist, which will guide you to the nearest hotel. And if you're not careful, the GPS will actually try to force you to use the shortest way. As starry-eyed as we were, we trusted our GPS. And ended up in front of some unpaved road, somewhere in the Champagne, not far from (but also not really close to) Paris.
Somehow, following very narrow streets, we managed to escape the wilderness and to end up in nice town called Château Thierry. And that's it for today!
Größere Kartenansicht
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