Day 12 Strasbourg, France to Bastogne, Belgium. A peaceful day through the countryside

---

Today was lovely day. We woke up to some delightful Fall weather. After breakfast Ray headed out to pick up our car which was parked on a nearby street. Not sure if I mentioned that the parking on the street was free from Saturday until Monday morning at 9:00 am. While he was gone I struck up a conversation with the concierge regarding the parking situation in Strasbourg. He said that normally the street parking was $35.00 for three hours. You pay for it at one of the stations located all around the city And you input your license plate number. If you should need more time, you must move your car to another location. They purposely make it difficult to encourage people not to drive into the City. He also said that he pays an extra half months rent to have a permanent space. None of us remember having this much trouble parking five years ago. To us it makes going to Strasbourg very undesirable. I suspect it is the same in most of the cities In France.

We Headed out into the countryside to Bitche, France where there are some interesting war sights. Our first stop was the Citadel of Bitche. It is an enormous fortress located at the top of a hill. It was constructed in 1624 and was restored and strengthened in 1740 into a fortress that was impregnable up until the 21st century. After paying the admission we headed up the steep sloped entrance where our tour began. We were issued headsets that gave us the history of the citadel as we walked through. The dark and dank interior along with the narration put you right into that time period. It never ceases to amaze us as to how these structures were constructed those many years ago. At the end of a 220 day siege by the Prusson army in 1871, the French surrendered the fortress. It passed through many hands after and was integrated into the Marginot line before WWII.
We then headed out to a significant part of the Marginot line. Having no problem finding it, we were disappointed to find it closed.

We then loaded Bastogne into the GPS and headed west. We stopped at a small town, name unknown, and found a small sandwich/pizza shop. Diane had a pizza, but we all had a sandwich that was out of this world. Stuffed, we continued on our way, arriving at our hotel in Bastogne around 3:30.

Having the compulsory nap, we went downtown around 6:00 for dinner. We had our wine/beer at an outdoor bistro, then found a nice small restaurant for dinner. The meal and the wine were excellent, and the owner treated us to a lemoncello after dinner.

Tomorrow we head back to Paris to overnight and head back home Wednesday morning.

I forgot to mention that We found out that the road we took from Chur to Arosa, Switzerland had Over 300 curves, no wonder I was car sick!

---