CERN

When I originally started planning this trip over a year ago, I asked all of the kids where in the world they wanted to go. Willow said Paris, River said anywhere, and Liam said “I don’t care, as long as the food is good.” So we decided on Italy, with a stop in Paris. Air France always stops in Paris, so that was easy. Then, I realized that we only have a few summers left to travel with Liam before he leaves home, so I had another talk with him about what was on his bucket list. At the top of the list was CERN, and its Large Hadron Collider. The location in Geneva, right in between Italy and France, made it a perfect fit for this trip.

CERN is notoriously hard to get a tour of. They no longer allow individual tours to be booked online – you can only book it from their wifi on the same day, if you’re lucky. So I booked an educational tour 9 months in advance, hoping that I could find 7 other people to join our group and meet the 12 person minimum. Sadly, I couldn’t find that many people who would be in Geneva on that day, so I had to let the tour booking go.

We made our way there in the morning, with the plan to arrive before they opened for the day and get on the wifi, so we could try to book the first tour the second it became available.

This involved some wandering around outside. They have this really cool sculpture outside that lists scientific achievements in the native language of the scientists who made them.

Bill was successful in getting us tickets for the 10:30 tour! While we waited for the tour to start, we explored the interactive exhibits.

The tour started with a walk to see the original particle accelerator, which operated from 1957-1990. The CERN campus is huge, and felt like its own city.

We saw a really interesting film about the old accelerator, and then our guide, a physicist who works at CERN, talked more about it. Then he answered questions.

Our guide looked like a retired physics professor.

Liam connected with another person on the tour.

After the tour, we went back to play with the exhibits until we had to leave for our train to Paris.

The internet was invented at CERN, and they still have the first web server there.

We tried using magnets to accelerate a particle manually. The timing was tricky.

We had to leave CERN earlier than we wanted to for our train to Paris. I wish I had left a whole day for it. The French countryside was so gorgeous though.

We arrived in Paris and figured out the metro, and finally made it to our hotel around dinner time.

It’s super cute! The elevator is sized for one person with luggage or two kids, but it’s only two flights of stairs so we’re getting our steps in.

We were all so hungry that we split up for dinner when the kids couldn’t agree. I took the boys for Indian food while Bill and Willow ate at a cute little French cafe.