Verdun

Our last day! Seems like forever ago that we were in Normandy. Today we went back in time.

After breakfast at the hotel we headed to Verdun, with a stop along the way at the largest American cemetery in France, for WWI. The drive was through the Meuse River valley and was very pretty.

The Verdun battlefield area is a large site with a number of memorials and a museum. The ossuary has the bones of over 100,000 soldiers, which was very powerful to see. We also visited the remains of one of the many towns that was wiped out.

Lunch was gallettes (savory crepes) in the town of Verdun.

The fitting last stop of the tour was in Reims, which was Eisenhower's headquarters at the end of the war (back to WWII) and where the Germans signed the unconditional surrender. The room was sealed up after the war, and it was interesting to see all of the maps on the walls as they were then.

The logistics were incredible. The allies laid numerous oil pipelines below the channel and across France.

Back to Paris for our final night. We had just enough time to drive past the major sights and grab a nice dinner.

Everyone had the onion soup