Versailles was designed to awe France's unruly nobility and peasantry. SWPL tourists have been visiting ever since. If you go, make sure that it's on a Sunday, the only day when they turn the fountains on. Pretty cool SWPL, actually.
And on this day in 1994, the Chunnel - the Channel Tunnel connecting England and France - opened.
It's a miracle of modern engineering, as are the high speed TGV (Train à Grand Vitesse; French high speed Bullet Trains). Both are unfortunately wildly uneconomical. The company that runs the Chunnel only sporadically makes a profit, and has had to restructure its debt obligations (under government guarantees) with a rather tedious regularity. Ridership peaked in 1998, oddly coinciding with the trip of the Borepatch clan.
Somewhere we have a child's complementary backpack (no doubt filled with plastic Pokemon toys) and a Eurostar "In Flight" magazine as souvenirs. Very SWPL.
Liberals love the idea of "high speed rail" even though it's just not economical for passenger service. Plus people love the convenience and freedom of owning and traveling by automobile. Which in turn drives the liberals crazy, so they try to stack the deck by making automobiles uneconomical. Hence their love of $4.00/gallon gas.
ReplyDeleteOnce again, as always with the liberals, control is the issue.