The road between Meaux and Metz passes through a countryside, dotted with small villages, that seems so pastoral that it is almost a cliché.  We keep saying, “Look at that, it’s beautiful”, over and over again. And the land is beautiful, but it is also an extraordinarily bloody land. The Romans fought here, Attila the Hun was defeated here – temporarily – in 451, and Napoleon won a major battle in 1814. Verdun and the trenches of World War I are nearby and Patton’s Third Army was stopped here in a series of battles that ran from September to early December in 1944. As sort of an aside, the memorial above honors African colonial troops who fought in World War I. End aside.An autonomous, automatic, egg store. One of the things I am particularly taken by is the mix of old and new. The almost timeless landscape through the windshield of a Citroën with GPS.