Pont du Gard

I have a love for Roman things, ever since I read the Jack Whyte's Arthurian Saga.  I thoroughly enjoyed his description of engineering techniques to drain a lake, build a road, or protect a village.  On this vacation, we spent some time looking at the Roman influences in France.  One of our favorite adventures was with Philippe, as he drove us down a Roman road constructed around 1100.  It was only wide enough for perhaps 3 horses...which made it a bit tight for our ten passenger van.   This experience made us look for other Roman roads, and some of them were plenty frightening as they got narrower and narrower while we travelled up a village road.  The houses kept encroaching on our path, and the driver...forgot to breathe.

Another thing we made a point of looking at however, was the Pont du Gard.  Built of the start of all our centuries,  it is a fascinating structure.  It was part of a 50 km aqueduct, used to move water from one place to another.  Pont du Gard is a series of arches placed in three rows.  There are six on the bottom, 11 in the middle, and 47 on the top row.  According to the site's website, it would have taken up to 1000 men working on it all, the time, for a period of 3 to 5 years.

I actually started to cry when I saw it.  The symmetry of it appeals to my sense of order, but the realization that it was built without mortar--it's held together only be careful planning and the friction of one stone against another--was one of the most fascinating discoveries.

We could see some faint engravings on the stones, numbers of the stones, mostly.  We could see how a stone from one arch would not fit exactly on another arch, though the construction is roughly the same.  The setting sun exaggerated the yellow tones of the stones, and it was just so lovely.
But, our visit there was not without problems.  We decided to be a bit touristy, and wanted to see the aqueduct lit at night.  So we went to a rather expensive restaurant at the base of it, and quite frankly, while the food was okay, we would not normally have bothered. But we wanted to linger a little longer at this amazing site.

The lights didn't come on. The arches slid away into a darkness so complete that there wasn't even a moonbeam to highlight it.  Not only that, when we finished our dinner and climbed up the stairs to the pathway, we were quite surprised to realize that it was barely lit either.  There was one light about every two hundred metres.

I'm not fond of walking in the dark.  It makes me nervous when I can't see my feet. Nervous enough that if I think about it too long, I can't move them.  So before that happened,  I took a deep breath and started out and in seconds fell so hard that I'm surprised the Pont du Gard survived it.  It seems that I was on a sidewalk that had a curb.  I didn't see it.   There was a little bit of blood.  There was a lot of swearing.  There were a fair number of tears too.

But, I have a unique souvenir from the Pont du Gard ...my knee appears to have a permanent bump. I am writing this post a month later, and it is still there.  I just have to reach down and touch the new profile of my knee and I am immediately transported back to Roman arches and Roman roads in France.

Now how many people can say that?