US Government map of Belgium.
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US Government map of Belgium. |
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The Battle of the BulgeBastogne and the Ardennes Forest |
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A friend of mine organized a World War II history trip. We started in Normandy at the D-Day beaches, then stayed in Bastogne for a couple of days seeing the area where the Battle of the Bulge was fought. Click here to see the D-Day section first.
There are some good books on the history. Steven Ambrose's Citizen Soldiers is outstanding. It starts where his D-Day leaves off and continues through the end of the war.
The battle itself was a major German offensive and Allied counter-offensive lasting from 16 December 1944 through 25 January 1945.
I had a preconception of the Ardennes area of southern Belgium as being largely rural, forested and hilly. Then I would think about what little I knew of Belgium, which was the flat, wide open and heavily settled northern part. I would assume that my assumptions were wrong.
But the Ardennes area is rural, forested and hilly!
Freedom to roam! L-R: Me, Tim (the planner), Jeff.
We had a rented car, which is vital for seeing much in the area without spending many extra days waiting on bus transport.
We rented a car from Europcar, they are a major car rental company with locations throughout Europe and what seem like relatively good prices. We picked up our Europcar at Brussels Midi Station where the Thalys and Eurostar international trains from France and the UK call. Brussels is very well connected by rail to the rest of Europe, and there are direct flights from North America. A train runs from the airport to the Midi Station every 30 minutes or so.
Lord Vader says: "I find your lack of understanding of the Metric system disturbing."
You will need to be able to use a manual transmission when you rent a car outside the U.S. Most drivers world-wide know how, and they will just assume you also do. If you don't know how, check carefully when reserving your car. They may have a few cars with automatic transmissions, but at reduced selection and therefore increased price.
You will also need to use the Metric system when you are outside the U.S. Kilometers, meters, litres, and so on. Well, unless you visit either Liberia or Myanmar (ex-Burma). The only countries in the world still using the Imperial system of measurement are Liberia, Myanmar, and the U.S. Really. And Metric is way easier:
And if you're using the UTM grid on your GPS, you can read it directly in meters or kilometers.
A modern credit card with an embedded smart chip and ISO standard electrical contact pad.
There's one more possible inconvenience caused by the U.S. being a little behind the rest of the world in some ways: Almost all countries' banks now issue credit cards that are smart cards, with electrical contacts and an embedded chip. It's a very nice security feature, you must use a PIN to use the card and so a stolen card simply cannot be used. All Australian credit cards have been smart cards since 1985. The problem is that old-fashioned American credit cards don't work in a lot of the automated kiosks, for example, the handy system that sells tickets in French train stations. We have to go stand in line with all the other Americans at the staffed ticket window where we can still use our quaint no-security cards.
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| © Bob Cromwell Mar 2010. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache. Root password available here, privacy policy here. |
