A Volcano and a Goat

I flew to Paris almost two weeks ago. My plane left Houston five and a half hours late, and arrived in Paris seven hours late. The cause of course, was the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, whose name I can't resist writing since I can spell it without looking it up anymore.

Yesterday morning, I took a train from Paris to Poitiers, where I changed to another train from Poitiers to Angoulême, in order to have lunch with an ex-colleague of mine. The second train, which was coming from Brussels, arrived five minutes late in Poitiers, but then stopped for 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere and arrived in Angoulême 27 minutes late. No, there wasn't an ash cloud along the track: the train ahead of us had hit a goat that was standing on the tracks. Goat against TGV: no contest here. Still, it's probably a good thing that the trains on that section go at about 125 mph (200 kph), not their usual 185 mph (300 kph).

When I was told about the reason for the train delay, I found it rather funny that while a mighty volcano can cause thousands of flights to be canceled and 200,000 passengers to be stranded for days, a humble goat, in the wrong place at the wrong time, can create a smaller commotion, delaying over 1,000 people (between the two trains, assuming it didn't cause an even worse ripple effect) by half an hour.