Coffee in Windsor and Tunnel in Lodi

 

This morning Travalon and I had a plan: we would get coffee at the coffeehouse in Windsor, then we would find the tunnel we had seen just south of Lodi. I knew about the coffeehouse because I get a Yelp newsletter, being an infrequent reviewer myself, and it was mentioned as one of the top coffeehouses in the area. Wow, we didn't know there was another business in Windsor besides the little Italian restaurant! (Which, sadly, seems to have been replaced by a meat market.) The coffeehouse was very cute, and I was excited to get a savory muffin there. Then we hit the road and found the tunnel, which is on Aqueduct Road. As you can see, the road goes through the tunnel, which goes under the railroad tracks.

Here it is from the other side, with a bluff in the background. There are a lot of these bluffs around Lodi.

It was a cold day, and when we tried to take a walk at the park in downtown Lodi, the wind was too fierce. Travalon suggested we hike on the Fern Glen Segment of the Ice Age Trail, since it is heavily wooded, so that would cut down on the wind. Not only that, but since we had to hike up a bluff, which took some effort, we actually got hot from being so bundled up. At the top of the bluff was a cleared area that looked like someone mowed it, with a road that went up to it. Here's a photo, but we didn't explore, since it was private land and we are not supposed to go off the trail.

Here I am, all bundled up against the cold.

Here are some late autumn colors that we could see from the trail.

As we drove on Highway J, we could see Gibralter Rock:

We drove to Fish Lake, which used to have a road that went around it. A few years ago it flooded, so you can't drive around it, but I figured since this was such a dry year, the flood waters must have retreated. However, the road is still closed. Then we went to East Towne Mall, where they were having some sort of comic book/geek sale, so Travalon was curious, but he didn't see anything right off the bat that interested him. He said he may go back tomorrow while I'm in Irish class. 

Then we watched the movie The Last Duel, which is the true story of the last trial by duel in Medieval France. We both really liked the movie and are puzzled that it was such a box office flop. The basic premise of the story is that there are two guys who were best friends, Jean and Jaques, but Jacques kept taking everything from Jean, like his land and his job, by sucking up to the guy in charge. I mean, that happens now too, not just in Fourteenth Century France. The twist was that Jean's wife accused Jacques of raping her, and the court was run by the guy in charge, so of course he found Jacques innocent. So then Jean invoked this "trial by duel" that hadn't been used in over a century, where the winner would be found to be telling the truth because God would be with him. If Jean lost, then his wife would be burned alive at the stake for lying. Of course I had made the mistake of reading about the actual trial and knew how it would turn out, but I still really wanted to see the movie. Fourteenth Century France was in rough shape after the Great Famine of 1315-17 and then the Black Death, so things were kind of crazy, and rape was rampant. It wasn't considered a crime against the woman but against her husband, so Jean had to bring the case instead of his wife. I am no expert in Medieval France (though possibly I know more about it than the average person on the street), so I can't speak to how authentic the setting was, but the story was riveting. It's told three times: from Jean's point of view, from Jacques' point of view, and from the wife Marguerite's point of view. Being a woman, I empathized most with her story. The sad thing is that women still do this to each other, telling other women, "It couldn't have happened like that," or, "They all do it - you just have to learn to live with it." And I know rape victims were grilled about their sex lives in court within living memory, so maybe we haven't improved as much as we think.

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