Day trip to Brugge

Matt and Leah Rozeski visited us from Milwaukee

and we did a day trip to Brugge and the Belgian Coast

The Tiger of Celles

We discovered this memorial today on one of our drives around the neighborhood in a small village called Celles, it's about 15 kilometers from our house.

If I can summarise part of the sign you see in the last picture, on December 24, 1944 Germans were trying to get to the Meuse river that runs by our house near Dinant. The tank in front drove over a mine, and they came to a stop. They were told by the local people that the roads were mined by the Americans all the way to Dinant, so they stopped coming. This was a lie of course, but the Germans believed it, and it was the closest point they got to us during the Battle of the Bulge. The picture below is the tank after it drove over the mine.

Here is a more detailed description.

After the war this woman had it brought in to Celles and opened a cafe behind the tank, which is still there today.

Floods on La Meuse in Belgium

After battling about half a meter of snow that has built up over the last two weeks we finally had three days in the fifties. The snow (pictured in my previous post) is gone, but it created another problem.
We came home from Luxembourg last night and we are now able to fish right off our veranda! We moved here to live on the river, but this is a bit close.

Their is a good picture in the Washington Post from Olloy-sur-Viroin, which is just down La Meuse from us.

A little excitement in Lustin

We had a little excitement just before the kids left. About 3:30 am we heard tires squealing and a crash outside next to the house along the bridge. After that a lot of screaming and yelling. There were two cars and a few kids there, and then they left. A few minutes later we have about 10 emergency vehicles there and they are spotlighting the river. About five am two tow trucks are finally pulling a car out of the river, and we have to wake the kids up to get to the airport in Cologne.

The picture in the paper next day says the driver fell asleep and then went to a friends house and changed into dry clothes.....We're not buying that, but evidently they did.
The car went in directly across the river in this picture.