The Romans accomplished some amazing things!

Today was Roman History Day at Pont du Gard. . . This magnificent Aquaduct, just outside Avignon, is the biggest, baddest, boldest bridge the Romans ever built, and they built a lot of them! 

Duane will tell you in a minute how far he had to climb to get you this picture, but first you have to see some more pictures. . . We took about a thousand and realized that not a single one really showed how BIG this thing is and what a monumental task it was to build it over 2,000 years ago. 

Here, at least you can see people and get some sense of how giant this thing is. It was a cloudy day :o( so some of the photos don't really show the spectacular coloring of the natural stones.

Here is a close up of one of the columns. Each one of those blocks is roughly the size of Wyoming. 

The History lesson here is, of course, that the Romans had a lot of science and engineering things figured out (Concrete and The Arch) a LONG, LONG time ago. Very little mortar, if any was used in the construction of this Aquaduct. They just stacked them all Very, VERY carefully and there they are today. There are no mortar joints . . . They just fit them together that carefully . . . All things are possible with a few smart people and enough slaves. Not that I'm saying that's a good way to get things done, just that it works. Ever wonder what happen in the dark ages when someone lost all this knowledge? 

This dandy old Olive tree is dated back to the 900s . . . 908 A.D., if my memory serves me right. Duane has no idea how someone knows when this tree was planted, but someone wrote it down and someone found that note! How's that for digging for scraps!

The museum here is really astounding (No Pictures allowed.) It tells the complete history of, not only this Aquaduct, but the entire water system in the Roman Empire. Now you know I'm not going to tell you about all that (Aren't you glad?!?) you can look it up yourself. That's exactly why Google was invented!