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. 
Category Archives: Cousins’ Trip
France is so….uh, French
We flew to into Paris via Charles-de-Gaulle Airport, rented a car and drove to Meaux, for the night, on the way to Germany and the cousins (saving the actual Paris for dessert). My first jetlagged impression, shock really, is that there are so many black people here – African-French? – way more than anywhere in the Bay Area, including Oakland. I think part of it, all of it, maybe, is that Meaux is an outer suburb of Paris and I remember reading, somewhere, sometime ago, that the outer suburbs of Paris are where a majority of immigrants live but, so far, not many women wearing Hajibs. 
A short stop in Iceland
We flew WOW to Europe with a 19-hour stop in Iceland. We left San Francisco about 8 pm, landed in Iceland about 10 am the next morning drove around a little, got a bite to eat, went to bed at about 9 pm, and got up at 3:30 to catch the flight to Paris. 
The Cousin’s Trip: European Edition
We are going to Europe tomorrow. Our excuse is that we are going to go to a reunion of Michele’s father’s extended family. Strangely, I think of Michele’s extended family as somehow American because I have only seen them here, here as at our house for dinner or at Tahoe, or Arkansas, or South Carolina. But, most of the cousins are European and while Michele has gone to Reunions in Ireland and The Czech Republic, this will be the first time I will see the family – the German Branch, anyway – in their native habitat.