Tag Archives: 80 Hours

Eighty Days – Day 1

Welcome to Paris! Today we’re continuing our trip Around the World in Eighty Days, following the fictional route taken by Phileas Fogg 150 years ago. I hope you remembered to turn off the heat in your room back in London. Passepartout forgot that.

He and Fogg left London the night before, took a train to Dover, a steamship to Calais, and a train to the French capital. Jules Verne spent few words describing this leg of the journey. Little wonder, since his readers knew this portion of the route well. Verne focused on character development here and introduced a major subplot, the pursuit of a bank robber by Detective Fix of Scotland Yard.

Passepartout regretted not spending more time in Paris, capital of his native country. He and Fogg rode in a carriage through the rain for an hour and forty minutes between two train stations.

At this point, Fogg had traversed some 294 miles, about 1.2% of the total distance, and he’d consumed 1.3% of his allotted time. On schedule with no mishaps or delays. The day before, when making the bet, he’d asserted, “The unforeseen does not exist.” So far, that had proved true.

“The Train” Claude Monet, 1872

In 1872, the population of Paris (minus outlying areas) numbered about 1.8 million. Adolphe Thiers served as the President of France, with Jules Armand Dufaure as President of the Council of Ministers.

Today, Paris claims a citizenry of 2.2 million. Emmanuel Macron is the President of the Republic, and the Prime Minister is Élisabeth Borne.

Had Fogg waited 150 years, he could have caught a flight directly from London to Paris with a flying time of one hour and twenty minutes. Truly, that unforeseen did not exist.

Trains, too, have changed. They no longer belch smoke like the one in Claude Monet’s 1872 painting, “The Train.” A traveler today can go by rail from London to Paris, through the Chunnel, in about two and a half hours.

If you’re enjoying this blog voyage, perhaps you’d like my latest story, 80 Hours, inspired by Verne’s tale, but updated to modern times. It’s available as an ebook from Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Rakuten Kobo, Scribd, Tolino, Vivlio, and Amazon.

All aboard! Next stop—Turin. We should arrive there tomorrow, according to your conductor—

Poseidon’s Scribe

October 3, 2022Permalink

80 Hours—Available for Pre-order

Next Sunday, October 2, 2022 marks 150 years to the day after Phileas Fogg began his trip Around the World in Eighty Days. I’ll celebrate this fictional event in two ways:

  1. My story “80 Hours,” will be available for purchase, though you can pre-order it now.
  2. I’ll begin a series of blogposts on the days when Fogg and his companions arrived in each city on their trip.

To Jules Verne’s reading audience in 1872, it must have seemed astounding to think someone could circle the globe in as little as eighty days. Today, we’re accustomed to the space station and manned spacecraft orbiting the earth in a little over eighty minutes.

For the rest of us non-astronauts, imagine facing the challenge of circumnavigating the earth in eighty hours with no preparation and with unknown, promised obstacles along the way. That’s the problem confronting shy and sheltered Wendy Pegram in “80 Hours.”

You may pre-order “80 Hours” in ebook form now at Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, Tolino, and Vivlio. Starting next Sunday, you’ll be able to get the book at those sites, and at Amazon, Scribd, and Rakuten Kobo.

If you’ve been itching to make the trip around our globe, you can do it for real. Or (far cheaper) you can read your way around the world by two different methods, courtesy of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

September 25, 2022Permalink