FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, DENMARK, NORWAY, SWEDEN - Part 1

FRANCE, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY,

DENMARK, NORWAY, SWEDEN – Part 1

May 17, 2012

The April weather continued into May with coolness, wetness, windiness…and with most people enduring seven weeks of this…bitchiness. And for the first day of our next jaunt, May 9, it followed. Light rain though turned to sunshine temperatures warm enough for shorts!! Okay then…no more complaining!

That day took us from Vendome, skirting Paris, through the un-vined part of the Champagne region and into the Lorraine department. Most of the day was through flat farmland called the Beauce, one of the largest agricultural regions in Europe. Verdun was our destination. This is where the largest battle of WWI took place. Ironically, some three kilometers from Verdun is a small town appropriately named Regret. The hills just outside Verdun were the hold-at-any-price front lines, and the price was steep. In 1916, two years into the war, the hills outside the town were bombed into oblivion. Nothing but mud, trenches which were part of a line from the North Sea to Switzerland, devastation, and corpses covered a grassless, treeless battleground. The fighting here lasted two years straight but the most fierce lasted seven months with non-stop shelling. The first two hours saw an estimated 1,000,000 bombs rip the hills apart….140 shells a second! By November 800,000 soldiers had died, an equal number from both sides. That’s 3810 a day!! There are huge French, German, and American cemeteries in the area with countless crosses marked “Unknown Soldier”.  Countless were never found. Some were found later. In one case, three years went by before someone noticed that bayonets were sticking out of the ground on one hillside; a search found that the rifles were still being held by dead French soldiers all buried alive by the mud blasted on top of them by the endless bombardment. The place is called “The Battlefield of Bayonets”. Nine towns were completely destroyed. Each is now marked at its original beginning and end with French road sides…as if they still existed…out of respect. Under a massive fortress in Verdun are the tunnels where up to 10,000 soldiers suffered, some waiting to go to the hills to be slaughtered, some waiting to die from the wounds they received where these frightened men were going. The cold, damp stench in the tunnels was nothing to what awaited them outside. We visited the battlefield of the Bayonets, the tunnels, and the hills above Verdun. It is an amazing shrine to humanity’s stupidity, cruelty, and hell-bent path to self-destruction. This is INTENDED to be one…long…paragraph. For every word in it, the full battle of Verdun lasted TWO DAYS!!! I had an uncle, my father’s brother who died in World War I, the so-called “war to end all wars”…well it didn’t! Come and see Verdun for yourself.

The next day we left Verdun and saw why this had been the major battle line. The hills outside the town suddenly became completely flat which of course would be more difficult to defend. The trenches in the ridge above Verdun made much more sense. The French department where Verdun is located is Loraine, part of France along with Alsace which went back and forth between French and German control for over a hundred years. Loraine is a depressed region now; it had lived on coal mines and steel mills now mostly gone. The towns show it; they are sad, buildings unkempt, and showing no flowers as are seen everywhere else in France.

Then it was through Luxemburg, a super-clean, super-crisp place with lots of wealth which shows in the cars, stores and buildings. We could move here. It’s a rolling hills region, very beautiful, and lots of vineyards. Very quickly it was into Germany without realizing it what with the lack of physical borders in today’s Europe. Beginning in Luxemburg we drove along the Mosel River in a fairly steep valley with vineyards everywhere including on the steepest of terrain. The Mosel River and its valley is one of the prettiest places we’ve seen anywhere. The river and connecting canals are used for pleasure boating as well as commercial transportation in barges. This area has some of the best cycling paths in Europe.

We continued northeast toward Kohl, Bremen and Hamburg. Canals in this region are also commonplace and well used.That afternoon and the next day saw driving conditions that varied from 25C, sunny and calm with light traffic to 7C, rain and 80 kph cold winds from the north with high-speed bumper-to-bumper free-for-alls. Wrestling a large, tall van in these latter conditions for a thousand kilometers was not exactly enjoyable. Our campsite in Germany was on the coast, battered by wild gusts…and totally warm inside our ever faithful White Night. This part of the country has mostly brick housing and lots of alternative energy sources with wind turbines and solar power.

On to Denmark where wind power is even more prevalent; not surprising in the flat land wind constant winds from the North Sea. The country side is rolling hills with large dairy and crop farming while the west coast is one long sand dune which protects the coast. At the end we had intended to take a small ferry but found absolutely no info on cost or times. We couldn’t even get the attention of the ferry crew when it did come in…so we left and went the long way around. Denmark is a camper’s heaven with great campground everywhere. The weather continues to suck with 10C, high winds and rain.

The next day was a quick hour drive to the west coast at the ferry port of Frederikshavn. We wanted to catch the 10 am boat but it couldn’t come in from Sweden due to high winds. We went into town with another French couple, Bernard and Chantal, we met on the docks. Found a coffee shop with a waitress who had an odd accent. She was from San Francisco and had lived there for 18 years. How did she like Denmark? Amazing, she exulted, especially with the socialized medicine!! The 2 pm crossing to Goteborg, Sweden was fairly smooth but we arrived at the height of traffic hour. Rain and crazy city traffic made for serious forehead creases. Drove to Grebbestad to camp. The town is small, on the coast and as pretty as they come. We stayed one extra to visit and rest up a bit from all the driving so far. It’s a place we could live since they already have life-size likenesses of the two of us.

May 16 we drove from Sweden’s west coast, up above Oslo, Norway and down to the Norwegian coast. The inland countryside is very much like British Columbia, Canada and made us homesick. Just inside Norway, we pulled over to let a car go by but as soon as we did it cut is off and stopped abruptly. Two young guys jumped out looking like well-shaved Rambos with killer gear hanging off them everywhere. What the…?!?! They announced they were from Customs Norway. Phew! A quick chat and they realized we weren’t smuggling people, drugs or fish. Although we didn’t confess that we had converted most of our van’s gas tank into a wine cellar!

As in Sweden, much of the homes and barns in Norway are painted the same colour…a wine red, usually with white trim. Houses are wooden since these countries have an ample supply of lumber. In Canada you see wooden houses with the clapboards laid horizontally while here they are put on vertically. A nice look especially on the numerous out-buildings which are on stone stilts. Lots of medium sized farms.

Finding campgrounds in this part of the world is and isn’t easy. They are plentiful but poorly marked. The one we finally found near Langesund, about 150 km southwest of Oslo, was one of the prettiest and most calm places we have ever seen anywhere. The mini-me fjord fifty meters behind us was stunning with rock formations from both platonic uplifts to smooth-as-glass rock polished by the last glacial age. The campground didn’t accept Euros or foreign credit cards so we had to go into town the next day to find an ATM to get local currency. Being May 17, Norway’s national holiday, parades were in the streets and the traditional costumes were out of the closet.

Price of fuel? Diesel was almost 14 Kronas or 2 Euros or about $2.75 Canadian!!! A liter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Twice the price of Canada and 50% higher than France.