The first thing I thought of was this pic from April 11's French History Messy Nessy Style: "Little Tuscany in the Heart of Paris":
But non.
Even better!
Via gCaptain, April 21:
Francois Mayor, managing director of Port Revel, steers a scaled-down model of a tanker, named the Brittany, on a lake at the Port Revel Shiphandling Training Centre in Saint-Pierre-de-Bressieux, France, April 19, 2021. Picture taken April 19, 2021.
Francois Mayor nudged back on the power and made a subtle adjustment on the wheel as he coaxed his cargo vessel through a narrow point in the Suez Canal — not the Egyptian one, but a replica in the middle of a French forest.
This stretch of water was built to train ship captains and maritime pilots how to navigate the Suez Canal — a skill now in the spotlight after the Ever Given cargo ship got wedged in the Egyptian waterway last month in high winds and a sandstorm.
The channel is built to one twenty-fifth the scale of a section of the real Suez Canal. Trainees have to steer through scale models of massive container ships without getting stuck.
“It’s a bit hard to recreate sandstorms,” said Mayor, the managing director of the Port Revel training facility, built around a lake in eastern France. “But we have gusts of wind which will push our ship to one side or another.”....
....MUCH MORE
