Atlas mural at CERN
We're home from our visit to France now, and since we were flying out of Geneva, I heard there were free tours of CERN available, so figured to sign up for one.
It turns out that signing up for a free tour of CERN is non-trivial. The tours are made available to book 15 days in advance, at 8:30am Geneva time, so I was watching the availability of each day leading up to the day we would be there becoming available, and they seemed to "sell out" pretty quickly.
On the day in question I got up early and was at my computer at 7:29am (Dublin time), looking at the CERN booking page waiting for it to become available. And it did, so I selected the slot I wanted and started typing in all of the details required. Unfortunately by the time I'd done that those times weren't available! Only the 1:00pm tour in French language was available by then, so that's what we ended up doing. Had I not been booked within 2 minutes of the tours opening up we'd have missed out!
It didn't really matter, to be honest - all of the videos were in French, but if I want them in English I feel finding them on the internet in English should be easy enough. The main thing was to see inside the CERN facilities, which was in itself quite interesting. Seeing the Atlas control room, and the original particle accelerator from the 1950's were definitely highlights.
It's nice that they have painted a mural of the Atlas detector on the above-ground part of the building where it is (it's about 30m below the ground here).