Is there an international statute of limitations? Hopefully. One fine day Elise and I were walking along a desolate path in southern England. The village of Findon, to be exact. I noticed a crappy stone wall. The wall would disappear into a thicket of bushes, resurfacing at will. It didn’t seem to serve much purpose. I took a closer look. It was even uglier up close. Wanting more data, I yanked off a chunk of the wall and tried to smash the piece on the ground. The chunk was unbreakable. Eventually I got bored, and we continued on our way.
Back at the bed-and-breakfast, I thumbed through a local history book. Hmmmm. Apparently the village had just one claim to fame: It had a 2000 year old stone wall built by the Romans during the Iron Age. It began to dawn on me why people hate Americans.
Two weeks later, I was sitting at a sidewalk cafe somewhere in the middle of France. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why someone had built a giant expressway through the middle of town. That beastly expressway was no more than a few hundred feet from where I was trying to eat. An even greater mystery to me was the absence of cars on the expressway.
When I got home I read up on that “expressway”. It goes by a different name: Roman aqueducts.