Just picked up David who had nearly a three hour delay in Atlanta due to storms; but at least we’re all home. With this photo I’ll end our blog for Europe 2014 and we hope to add to the blog in 2016. Thanks for reading! “Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.” Oliver Wendell Homes, Sr.Alex and I at the Frankfurt airport. We dropped David off at his gate (he’s going from Frankfurt-Atlanta-Seattle) and we’re flying directly from Frankfurt to Seattle.
Our last full day in Europe. We parted company with the Texas Kobs about 9:30am and we headed to the train station for a leisurely 3 hour train ride to Frankfurt where we fly out of tomorrow. Here we have the cousins saying their good-byes.
Today, Wednesday, we took a three hour walking tour of Brussels that was excellent. The photo above and several of the photos below are of the beautiful Grand-Place. Brussels is a stunning city that as I understand it is off the beaten track for tourists which surprises me.
A view of the Grand-Place spire from a distance.Alex enjoyed the Manneken Pis statue which after the Statue of Liberty and Michelangelo’s David is the third most recognizable statue in the world.
Our most excellent guide Mick. The tour was a wonderful way to top off our last full day of site seeing. Tomorrow it is off on what hopefully a fun and relaxing three hour train trip to Frankfurt for a one night stay and then we depart from the Frankfurt airport for home on Friday.
We spend all day Tuesday on a tour of the area fought over during the Battle of the Bulge. Our first stop was the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery which was a powerful experience.Throughout the day we stopped at a number of monuments and the guide provided a great narrative of the events that took place at the various sites. Nearly 600 American soldiers died in the area pictured above and are commemorated by the monument.This site memorializes POWs that were slaughtered by the SS shortly after the battle started.A German tiger tank sits in one of the villages. I had no idea how big these tanks were. We also saw a Sherman tank (dwarfed by the Tiger) and a Panzer tank.Similar to the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery, the Recogne-Bastogne German Military Cemetery memorializes the German dead from the Battle of the Bulge.This photo might not show it well, but it is of a fox hole that was on one of the defensive perimeters near Bastogne. It’s amazing that nearly 70 years after the battle there are so many fox holes in the Ardennes Forest.This monument is for the 101st Airborne which helped defend Bastogne. The book/HBO series “Band of Brothers” was based in part on the experience of soldiers from this unit.In Bastogne there was a beautiful monument to the battle and an absolutely outstanding museum that we could have easily spend half the day at it.The monument lists all 50 states and Wisconsin and Washington were in the same section.Alex, Kevin and David in front of a half track in a small Belgian village.
We traveled to Bruges on Monday. We visited the city on our 2012 trip but the Texas Kobs hadn’t seen it before so we had no problem going there again. During our last visit there was scaffolding on all the major buildings and on this trip all of it was gone so we really got to appreciate the beauty of the town square.I really loved the town square so I’ll indulge myself with posting several photos of it!
Our crew less Janet who kindly took the photo.Our goal was to climb this tower, about 370 steps one way, and the the last “departure” time was 4:15pm. We arrived at 4:04pm and were turned away because there were too many people in line which was a shame.I have a photo of Kevin and Alex walking side by side from our 2012 trip (Berlin) so when I saw them walking together here I wanted to take a companion shot for the previous trip’s photo.
We arrived in Brussels Sunday evening and we’re in an absolutely beautiful apartment. That being said, we had some significant issues. My sister-in-law (Janet) and I planned this trip, as we do all of our European adventures, and when we booked our flight from Olso to Brussels we assumed that it was the same Oslo airport we flew into a couple of days ago. We took the bus to the airport and found out that there is another Oslo airport much further away from the airport we flew into to. We ended up missing our flight so that is a disaster. I will say that we recovered quickly and booked another flight on Estonia Airlines that took us from Oslo to Tannin, Estonia then from Tannin to Brussels and we arrived in Brussels about seven hours later than our originally booked flight. A major drag that tacked on about $650 to our trip but I was shocked that we were able to find a flight from Oslo to Brussels and the day we wanted to fly and the price per ticket was a bit over $200 per person. Plus, we added Estonia to our list of countries visited!Just another view of the apartment. The two photos don’t do it justice, it’s a gorgeous place very close to the city center.
We started a bit later today due to weather which cleared up nicely by early afternoon. Here are Alex, David, and cousin Kevin.We visited a terrific Norwegian resistance museum today. It provided an informative overview of the German invasion of Norway and the events that followed. We then went to an excellent Norwegian military history museum which was surprisingly good and was free. The photo above is from the castle which was a bit disappointing.Here’s another view of the castle. The castle itself was gorgeous. My gripe is that there was very little history of the castle provided to us. We knew from the Military History museum we visited earlier that the castle was laid siege to 9 times. In the castle, unfortunately, little attention was paid to these events and instead the focus was more on its role as a prison from the 1800s on. Too bad but it was still fun to visit.
We arrived in Oslo Thursday bidding a fond farewell to Amsterdam. Oslo definitely lived up to its reputation as an expensive place as our eyes popped out a bit at the price of a $30 burger and a $15 Big Mac (we didn’t eat in McDonalds). Still, we like the city thus far and went to a couple of good museums, the photo above coming from the Maritime Museum and this dugout dates back 2200 years.Our next stop was the Viking Museum which was very good but limited its coverage to three Viking burial ships that were found in the 1880s and 1904. I was hoping for a more comprehensive museum covering Viking history. This burial boat dates back to 890 AD or so.From the same museum we saw this wagon which also dates back to 890 AD. We also visited the Kon-Tiki Museum which commemorates Thor Heyerdahl who built reed boats and crossed the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.While we were only able to access the outside grounds of the Oslo Castle today (Friday) we’ll have a more in-depth visit tomorrow. This photo of it is from the ferry ride we took today.
We spent much of the day on the canals today which was great. I really didn’t take any good photos that showed the intricacies of the canals but I’ll show what I took. This photo is of the train station which I think is a beautiful building.I took this photo because I liked the building plus it dates back to 1661 which you might be able to see in the upper right hand side of the building.On our canal tour I think I heard that there are approximately 2500 bridges in Amsterdam.This building had three different architects working on it and they could not agree on a design so each designed their own tower for the building.Alex wanted to a photo with the cow that was close to the Tulip Museum so I obliged. The Tulip Museum was fun and surprisingly informative. We also visited the Dutch Resistance Museum which went into detail about the Dutch resistance to the Germans in WWII. It was an excellent museum and we spent over two hours in it.
More rain on Monday which limited our movements for much of the day but we still made it out for a walk, lunch and dinner. Tuesday was a great day and we headed out to see the Van Gough museum which I thought was terrific. We spent over two hours walking through the various exhibits.We also went by the Anne Frank museum but decided to skip it as the lines were long. The line above goes until the red awning in the background and also quite a ways to the right of the photo. We looked into making online reservations but the first openings are in next week.After lunch we went to the Rijksmuseum for nearly 2.5 hours which was a good time. Lots of Rembrandts, a couple of Van Goughs and other Dutch painters. Tomorrow we will spend much of the day on the Hop On Hop Off canal tour which should be lots of fun.
