CGAHGFI

Bonjour, mes amis! We are in Paris, which is such a beautiful and amazing city where people speak a language that I can understand at least a little bit of! I loved Germany, but France... J'adore la France!  We started the day with a tour at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Those who know me know that I *love* a cemetery, and the cemeteries of Paris are the ultimate! There are four major ones, each in north, west, south, or east Paris, and Père Lachaise is the cemetery in the east. Dan will have better photos, I'm sure, but here I will share mine:     This memorial to the more than 94,000 Parisians who died in WWI lists the names by year that they died, with a category at the end for those who died at an unknown time. You can read more about the wall at https://memorial14-18.paris.fr/memorial/#. It was unbelievable.  One of the gates at the cemetery   This is the ossuary where they store the bones of those bodies that occupy gravesites that the families no longer want to...

Today we had to get up and get back to Frankfurt - our longest drive. So Cody and I grabbed some breakfast at the cafe I found yesterday, then we all packed up and hit the road. As noted by another on this blog, I don't particularly care for hauling ass on the highway, but we were on the Autobahn and under a deadline, so Cody pushed it. When I looked over (which I tried not to do often), he was hitting 165kph a few times - that's 102mph. And it was only because he knew I was nervous that he didn’t go faster. We did stop for a quick lunch - at a sushi restaurant. We tried three other places, but apparently Boxing Day is a day for everyone to go out to eat, so they were all full. The sushi joint was close to the highway, so we tried it. It was OK. We made it to the Frankfurt train station and dropped the car off, there and not at the airport, hoping that what we had been told by the rental company was correct. We will see. We boarded the French TGV Inoui. French train travel is g...

 Cody and I went to Dachau.  The inside of the entry gate "Arbeit macht frei: Work sets you free" The camp looks immense, but it was built for only 6000 prisoners. Starting in 1933, political prisoners were sent there, and in 1940, other prisoners (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, criminals - anyone the Nazis considered a threat to the purity of the Aryan race - were housed here. Up to 32,000 people were here at one time. The camp was liberated at the end of April, 1945.  A rebuilt barracks  One of many watchtowers Here you can see foundations of barracks and one side of the wall that surrounded the camp. "Crematorium Remember how we died here" A replica of the crematorium At Dachau, the crematorium was used to incinerate the bodies of those who died from disease, malnutrition, exhaustion, or execution. Although a gas chamber was built, according to the information on the site, "There was no mass killing of people by poison gas in the Dachau concentration camp. It i...