Our Saturday Excursion

On Saturday, we had a day full of excursions, both engineering-focused as well as culturally-oriented.  The day began with a morning in the trees!  At La Canopée Dentelée, students got to experience Accrobranche, where they traversed a high ropes course strung throughout the trees with many different obstacles.  Ranging from tightropes to ziplines (while of course being harnessed in), the students had a ton of fun traveling through all of the different challenges.

Following this, we traveled to the Saint-Ferréol lake, which is a reservoir created by a dam used to supply water to the Canal du Midi.  After having a picnic lunch under the trees in a park, we had an afternoon of relaxation.  Students relaxed, played games, and visited the beach for some swimming, and were all able to enjoy the nice warm weather.

Our next destination was a museum all about the Canal du Midi.  We learned about this remarkable canal built in the 1600s, joining the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea to allow transport ships to be able to bypass needing to travel through the Strait of Gibraltar.  In addition to simply being a canal, there were a number of remarkable engineering innovations as part of this project, ranging from canal tunnels, bridges where the canal passes over another river, and an ingenious structure to manage where the canal crossed through another river at essentially the same height, but prevented significant amounts of water from flowing into each other.

In the evening, an astronomy club joined us at our residence, and set up a number of both refracting and Dobsonian telescopes.  Once the sun gave us a beautiful sunset, we were able to begin our astronomy evening by viewing Venus, Mars, and the Moon.  Later in the night, once the sky became much darker, we viewed a binary star system, a nebula, and a globular cluster.  It was really exciting to get to see so many amazing objects in the sky!