Circle the Sphere

Our home for 6 weeks, Annecy is an amazing out-door oriented city with culture about as French as they come.  On arrival to our apartment, the owners greeted us with a gift of local wine and cheese and offered recommendations for all of the important things we might need (boulangerie, fromagerie, boucherie – apparently that’s 90% of what you need).  The city is nestled in at the north end of Lac D’Annecy. Looking south-east from a huge waterfront promenade, the Alps begin; while looking behind you (over the city), the foothills roll away into the Rhone valley. It’s quite the spot.

Our arrival in early September meant the days were still hot, so afternoons were often spent at the beach (the lake is chilly but refreshing).  As September unfolded, the days got a bit shorter and cooler so we transitioned from the lake to the activities surrounding it – namely cycling, hiking and exploring the old town (especially the markets on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays).  Cycling in particular is very popular (the Tour de France regularly includes stages in and around the lake) with a designated path that almost encircles the lake and bicycle lanes throughout the city. Bikes are simply part of the fabric of this city.

We selected this spot to spend a longer stretch of time based on this reputation of a very active, out-door oriented town.  As we progress through our trip, we expect to have a combination of places we travel through quickly (classic tourist travel) and others where we spend more time (long enough to get bored with the tourist stuff and dig a little deeper into the local culture).  The extended time also allows us to bring back something resembling a routine which helps everyone recharge with so much time away from home.

With several weeks in this spot, I’ll update later with the things we found, but so far this is a great spot.

For data loving nerds out there, this one’s for you:

So how do you know that you traveled “Around the World”?  As far as I know, there is no association to call up and ask what the rules are on what qualifies as having completed a circle around this planet.  That means you pretty much get to make up whatever rules you want. In our case, the thought at the outset was to keep travelling east until we get back to our starting point and that should do the trick.  There is undoubtedly a camp of some type of purists out there with strict rules about routes, number of countries visited or something like that. I haven’t gone looking for them, but in the interest of providing a bit of data to our jaunt, I’ve decided to track our progress by comparing it to the circumference of the Earth.  Since our route is developing as we go, we might match this number, we might not, but it gives a tidy little benchmark.

According to numerous internet sources (if they all say the same thing it must be true after all), The accepted circumference of the earth is approximately 40,000 km.*  With that in mind, our starting point was Toronto, Canada and as I write this first data point we are in Annecy, France. Next step is to use some other fancy websites to obtain latitude & longitude figures, punch them into an online calculator & poof, we generate data!

As of today, This puts us around 7,000 km travelled or approximately 17% of the way around.  If I can figure out how to do it, eventually I’ll build some cool graphic to show our progress but since I’m really about the data, it’s entirely possible that this just won’t happen.

Happy Monday!

*note 1: several sources claim significant figures to the nearest km, others to the nearest meter.  In general this seems to be done for the purpose of illustrating the difference between the equatorial circumference and the polar circumference).  Quite frankly I don’t need this level of accuracy, nor do I believe it without having a detailed list of assumptions made since a perfect circle simply does not fit around the earth.  With this in mind, I will consider significant figures only to the closest 1000 km, anything less than that is well within the error of extra distance travelled on short car trips, bicycle trips or even daily walks to the grocery store which would just be absurd to measure!  Comparing the circumference of 40,000 km to say the distance if you just went around the 45th parallel (roughly 28,000 km according to the same internet sources), we see a sufficient level of accuracy at the 1000 km mark to see if we made it close to the distance that in general allows us to Circle the Sphere.

When you decide to take a year off and spend all of your time together as a family, it conjures up images of never ending smiles and happy moments.  Real life has a lot of that, but let’s be honest, there is a bunch of other stuff in there that we don’t talk about – especially in today’s world where the dirty bits get filtered out and social media feeds are full of happy beautiful moments.  This is the first in what I hope will be a series of snippets of real life – for those who can’t help but look behind the curtain.

Part 1 – Things my kids do that annoy me.

Now I love my kids, but being with them 24 hours a day for 8 months is an unusual circumstance – the sort where little things can get on your nerves.  This week, I’ve compiled a list of the top three things my kids do that really annoy me:

#1) Stop walking for no apparent reason when they are 6 inches in front of me.  This is a daily occurence. I’m getting better at anticipating it – if I notice they have started drifting in front of me, I fade back or look for an opportunity to move to the side, but inevitably, they get me. Sometimes I think it’s this subconscious power-game they’re playing.  When they make their move, I am forced to decide between slamming into them or throwing myself sideways into a wall / parked car / random pedestrian. Being their dad, my instinct is to protect, so my body somehow avoids them at all costs (many apologies to the random people I have bumped into).  Point being, it really annoys me when they stop right in front of me.

#2) Ask questions that no reasonable person would expect me to know the answer to.  Now I know what you’re thinking – my job as a parent is to teach my kids to be independent thinkers, to come up with questions that I can’t answer and to celebrate this as part of their development. I say BAH!  When it switches from curiosity to a daily interrogation of why I don’t know more things, it moves from cute to annoying. Maybe this makes me a bad parent, maybe it’s just that I’m a real person. Ultimately, it’s who I am – it really annoys me when they don’t stop asking irrational questions.

#3)  Act completely oblivious to the presence of other people.  I’m hoping this one is development based and will go away with time, but things like using the airplane seat in front of you as a drum kit or shouting with glee inside a museum because they “saw a bird – a real live bird inside” these things drive me bonkers.  Each and everyday we have a moment where we stop to discuss where we are (inside) and what voice to use (inside voice). I don’t get it, they learn so many things so quickly, why does this one take so long to sink in? It really annoys me when I have to remind them to consider the existence of other people.

Okay that’s my whiny pants post for today, I’ll try to make my next dose of reality less complaint oriented but right now, it felt good to get that off my chest – anyone else out there share my sentiments, or am I alone on this?