Mercedes Benz

We were able to select an optional tour allowing us to visit the Mercedes Benz factory located at Rastatt. The assembly part of the plant was not air conditioned so the heat was pretty intense.  However, the place is amazing!  In addition to building awesome cars, the plant itself uses so much automation and robots to ensure consistency and quality.

The company does not allow pictures in the plant, but did have a guest area with two cars on display. The sports car that lists for 174,000 Euros was locked but I did get to sit in this one below.  I was really hoping they would just let me bring it home.  Apparently I wasn't convincing enough.....

Strasbourg

Strasbourg is a beautiful city....of course, it seems like every place we visit here is beautiful.  I didn't know that Strasbourg is one of the capitals of the European Union, so we got to drive through the area with the European Parliament and their Court.

Next was the actual city center, with the beautiful cathedral.

The organ was gorgeous -- the organist actually has a door to sit inside this and play from there -- I'm not sure how one would keep their hearing that way.

Interestingly enough, the stained glass windows in the cathedral were taken out and hidden for safety during WWII.  And the real "Monuments Men" rescued them!!

At the entrance to the city center is a building called the Barrage Vauban -- apparently it sits on top of a "weir" which, best I can tell, means it is a small dam on the river.

The city is gorgeous!!

The Colmar Pocket Campaign

Apparently one of the important campaigns of WWII was the Colmar Pocket campaign.  Audie Murphy was a part of this campaign.  As we continued with the tour of his memorial and other key points of the battle, we were fortunate enough to be able to tour the museum as well as the American Memorial at a place called Sigolsheim.  We had an amazing guide (as are all of the Viking guides) who should be a history professor, she was fantastic in explaining so much of the impact of this battle on the war and on this region:

The Sigolsheim memorial was at the top of a hill and the view enabled us to see the relationship of all the towns that were a part of the battle.   The American flag flies over this memorial and there are also battalion patches for all the soldiers who fought here.   We are hoping to be able to find the Audie Murphy autobiographical movie when we get home.

Storks and the Alsace Region

There are lots of storks here!  And they are protected being that they are the symbol of this region of France, called the Alsace region.  In every town, we saw the huge nests as well as the huge storks that call those nests home.

We also learned that this is how babies are delivered in the Alsace!  Apparently, you leave sugar cubes on the window sill for the stork, and nine months later, the stork delivers a baby.  

Can you spell *H*O*T*

It seems that we arrived in Europe during an unusually hot summer (sounds suspiciously similar to the 'unusual' weather story that I got when I moved to Minnesota).  It has gotten over 90 degrees every day that we've been here.  Thankfully the ship and the tour buses have AC, but many of the things we tour do not.

#wearehavingaheatwave     #OMGitshot    #thatsplashpadsurelooksgood

Audie Murphy memorial

After a wonderful morning excursion to the Black Forest, we were fortunate enough to do the optional excursion to visit the Audie Murphy memorial.   Audie Murphy was the most decorated soldier in WWII, but I didn't realize all the details of his heroism until yesterday.  France has put up a memorial on the site of the battle where he single handedly held off a much larger force of German soldiers for over an hour.

The internet is being painfully slow, so hopefully I can upload some additional pictures of the day.  Tomorrow we get to tour Strasbourg  AND do a tour of the Mercedes Benz plant -- I'm hoping they do free samples!

The Black Forest

Our first cruise excursion took us into the Black Forest.  We managed to do a short hike and enjoy the scenery....  we also learned a few things: The forest isn't black, it's mostly made up of evergreens.  The German word is Schwarzwald and means "black woods" simply because it was so dark in the forest