Le Village Des Automates and The Pont Du Gard

This morning, we decided to let the kids run around and be kids. They have been real troopers most of this trip and they deserve a morning of kid fun! After passing it yesterday on the way to Avignon, we drove to Les Village Des Automates , a huge park in the woods about 20 minutes from Aix. We were there on a weekday morning and besides a small school group and a couple other families, we pretty much had 16 acres of park all to ourselves. The kids rode go carts, bikes, and trikes. They saw animals-ducks, chickens, goats, sheep, donkeys and ponies. They enthusiastically completed obstacle courses and rode zip lines. They saw puppet shows and played in a (fake) castle. After playing for a few hours, we ate our picnic lunch. After lunch, the kids had a few more rounds on their favorite ride (pedal cars on a track about 12 feet in the air, with a rod for Dad to use to pull them along from the bottom), and we left the park happy. The sun, trees, fresh air, and exercise did us all good.

After our park play morning, we drove to the ancient Roman aqueduct bridge, the Pont du Gard, a site Monsieur Bacon has wanted to see for quite a while. I won't summarize the whole Wikipedia article for you, but suffice it to say that it was amazing. We couldn't stop thinking about the staggering amount of work to bring water over 30 miles into Nimes. Much of the aqueduct was underground, dug without machines or dynamite. The bridge only drops a single inch over its entire length (I can barely get a picture hung on the wall with a laser level) while the entire aqueduct only drops 56 feet over 31 miles! The bridge is built mostly without mortar, the meticulously cut blocks held together by gravity. When most of the world was hauling swamp water with sheep bladders, the Romans made a point of building great engineering projects to bring running water and sewage systems to newly conquered areas. "Hey guys look! Aren't these fountains and baths awesome? Aren't you glad we conquered you so you could be Romans too?" Or something like that, I'm sure.

"What are all the big people looking at? Don't they know there are rocks and ants on the ground?!"

We made the climb up the side of the gorge for a view all to ourselves, then we hiked up the rest of the way to walk along the aqueduct's ruins in the mountains for a while. As soon as we turned around, about the furthest you can get from shelter, it started raining! We started running, but we were quickly soaked and running just didn't make a difference anymore. So we distracted the kids by having them stick their tongues out to catch rain drops, which turned it into a game!  By the time we toured the museum and got back in to the car, we were pretty much dry again and ready to head home for a take-out pizza and a good night of sleep.