Dunkirk and the Atlantic Wall

Before I begin today I'd like to ask a question that'd been vexing us. How can Europeans, with all they've contributed to the world's culture, cuisine, art, philosophy and so on, fail so miserably when it comes to putting together a simple shower? Why, when our bathroom ceiling is a good seven feet or so from the floor, is the shower mounted at one's thighs? Why does the glass only extend halfway, soaking the rest of the bathroom? How come you can't get soap to your feet without bumping the heat to twice the scalding threshold? Anyway...

Northeast towards Calais today, after a light breakfast buffet at the hotel (fruit, croissants, cereal with yoghurt, coffee, etc).

We stopped first at the museum of the Atlantic Wall, the site of one of four enormous guns pointed at England. They have a good collection of war paraphernalia and one of the rare rail car guns.

These bikes would come in handy on the commute some days...

Close by is Cap Gris-Nez (Cape Grey Nose), the closest point in France to England. Beautiful day with a view of the Cliffs of Dover.

Next we visited La Coupole, the site of a real-life James Bond evil mastermind lair. The Germans built this massive 5-meter-thick contrete dome to assemble and launch V2 missiles. There's an excellent film and exhibit, including V1s and V2s, spare engines and more related to rockets and space. The tunnels underneath were dug through solid rock and have a somewhat menacing feel, especially knowing 6000 slave laborers died during the construction. Evil lair indeed.

This is a wild thought: When Dad was working on the space program at the Cape his bosses knew Werner Von Braun well, who knew Hitler. I have really mixed emotions about the US bringing all of the rocket scientists over after the war. On the one hand they went on to do incredible things for science, on the other they were responsible for the deaths of thousands.

The last WWII site of the day was Dunkirk, where over 300,000 British and French troops were evacuated after the German blitzkrieg invasion of France. Dunkirk's a rather busy, unremarkable port city from what we saw. The museum of the evacuation has a nice video and collection of artifacts, in particular some great scale dioramas showing the action in the port. It's an interesting story about a very intense period. Following the museum we got really off the tourist path and made our way out to the breakwater and beach where the men loaded onto the ships. It's not likely to make a Rick Steves guide but for a history tour it was an important site to see.

On to Brugge, Belgium. It was tough to leave France behind, but one look at Brugge and I had no regrets. Will give Brugge its own entry after taking some more photos in the morning. Gorgeous.