Thursday, June 5 – More Lorraine

Solved the picture problem last night and will catch up ASAP. Recall that the pictures seemed to be loading to the blogger site, but I could not get them into the posts. The blogger program said my browser (Internet Explorer) was not optimized for it. I tried Google Chrome without success, which is strange because blogger is part of Google. You would think they are optimized to work together. Last night I downloaded and installed Firefox. It works slick as a whistle.

I was up extra early this morning, so I will get a head start on the day and maybe even get caught up on pictures.

There are a lot of stops on our itinerary today, but it should go quite quickly. When Pat and Kathleen met with their cousin the other night, he briefed them on his pre-scouting mission. Some of the villages they wanted to see have only a handful of houses and no church or cemetery. They offered to drop them, but I argued that we are here and we are going to other nearby villages anyway, we might as well at least drive through and see them. That, after all, is the purpose of our trip: to walk where your ancestors walked, see their villages (admittedly, much changed), see the countryside that they lived in, and get a feel for how nearby neighbouring villages are. In fact here is an extreme example. As we drove out of one of Erv’s villages, the sign for entering the next one was across the street. It was only one newer street, but the rest of the village was only a few hundred yards ahead, giving an appreciation that ancestors from two different villages may have lived quite closely together. We made a similar discovery later in the day when we found that one of Ray and Carol's villages was too small to have its own cemetery (although it had a very small church/chapel of unknown vintage). Residents were buried in a very nearby village.

Our hotel is one of the nicest we have ever stayed in on any of our trips. It is the Roi Soleil (Sun King), named after Louis XIV. His portrait logo is on everything. It is very new and everything is first class.