Viva La France!

Today we traveled into France to see the Maginot Line and visit Strasbourg (yes it is in France).  The Maginot Line bunker we visited was interesting we walked 3km (~2 miles) of tunnel to see everything in that particular bunker to include the living area, power plant, hospital area and of course the munitions and guns.  It is about a constant 15C or around 60F in the tunnels and bunker. To transport items they used electric powered mini trains which ran down track inside the bunker tunnels.  The living quarters were kind of tight especially if you were not an officer.  The power generators were huge and used multiple large inline 6 cylinder engines (the cylinder were close to a foot in diameter) to produce the power needed.  The counter weights to move the turrets up and down are impressive and still contain all the necessary the gears to move the turrets.  I also determined that medium caliber munitions racks would double nicely as a wine rack (I need to get some).  Overall, it was a very interesting experience.  From there we traveled to Strasbourg.

Strasbourg was nice. We at a local café and confused the waitress because we didn’t order wine with our meal and were happy with our original drinks.  I visited Strasbourg back in 2003 with a friend but did not see a lot of it, because we went on a river tour, which was nice but didn’t give us a chance to experience the city. This time we walked around and visited the large church. The church was pretty and had impressive stain glass windows and two pipe organs.  From there we walked around some more and saw a double decker carousel, we did not ride it though (cost too much). We also sampled some really good apricot cookies in a little store.  After we got done wandering through the city we headed back to Baden-Baden via the autobahn. Monday we head up to Heidelberg to see our first castle of the trip. 

You can see pictures from the Maginot Line here and Strasbourg here.