Day 9: Europe

 Kasey- So my planning wasn't very good with going to Church and seeing the members. We arrived in Brussels around 10 our first day in Europe and the next Sunday was General Conference, so things didn't work out too well with that. We left early from Mark's. This was another one of those days where we had a lot planned. We first drove through Cappelle, which is right next to Rotterdam and was my second to last city. I was only there for 6 weeks but had good memories from it. The only thing I really wanted to see was my old apartment and the Prins Alexander metro station.

 After Capelle we went to Kinderdijk, which is a pretty touristy place with lots of windmills. It was a pretty day, so that was fun walking around and taking pictures.
 

 We then drove through Belgium down to Maastricht, the oldest city in the Netherlands. Maastricht is a fun little city split by a river and has some neat Cathedrals.

 

We also saw the Helpoort, which is an old Roman gate.

 
We walked around the Roman walls and saw where D'artagne, one of the musketeers, was killed.

 The old Roman walls still look how I imagine they did several hundred years ago. It was interesting to imagine people coming through the gates and the battles that took place outside of the city walls. After Maastricht we said good-bye to the Netherlands and spent pretty much the rest of the day in Belgium. I had never been to these parts of Belgium because they are French speaking. The rolling hills are pretty and lush green with lots of little towns.

 We went to the Henri-Chappelle American Cemetery. I've always liked going to these American cemeteries overseas to ponder the value and price of freedom and appreciate and thank those who died in the wars. On my mission we went to a cemetery really close Maastricht and I overheard a little Dutch girl ask her mom what all the crosses were. Her mom replied that they were the graves of soldiers who died fighting for their freedom. That really touched me. I think about that experience whenever I go to military cemeteries.

 The next thing we did was went to several Battle of the Bulge sites, starting with Malmedy/Baugnez where the Malmedy Massacre took place. It's actually the scene that happens at the beginning of Saints & Soldiers. After that we drove to St. Vith and then Vielsalm where some battles happened and then to La Roche-en-Ardennes. That place also had a major battle in WWII. All these places were really pretty, but I especially through La Roche was pretty because it's a small town on a river in a steep valley. We then went to Foy and then Bastogne. Outside of Foy was a monument to the 101st Airborne Division.

  In Bastogne there was a monument from the people of Belgium to their American liberators. All day we saw really pretty landscape in the Belgian countryside, nice and quaint little towns, and lots of memorials to the events of the Battle of the Bulge. In each place we went to for the whole trip I had printed out a background that I found online, mostly at wikipedia. We read all about each site we went to before we would go and learn about the history which helped us appreciate it more. After Belgium we drove up to Koln, Germany. It was a pretty fun experience driving in Germany. The cars drove so fast. You'd see a little car in the rear-view mirror and then in a few seconds it would blow right past you. We had a lot of fun with that. So we made it to Koln and luckily found our hotel without too much trouble. A lot of the cities we drove around were really lousy at labeling the streets. All my prep had the names of the streets, so it didn't help us that much. We would often follow the directions as far as we could and then when we saw a map we would re-assess where we were and make sure we were going the right way. But yeah, luckily in Europe there are a lot of maps off to the side of the road.