Wednesday, June 4 – Lorraine

The breakfast was cheap, so I didn’t expect much, but it was still a little disappointing. Not much variety.

Weather today was a little bit cooler and overcast. There was some light rain for a while after noon and occasional light drizzle at other times during the day.

We were in the French province of Lorraine today. We had a lot of stops, but they went quite quickly. The custom in this area is that the cemetery is normally right on the church grounds and the graves are family plots that are recycled through the generations. So there aren’t individual monuments, making for way fewer overall. Of course we don’t expect to find any of our ancestors, but it is interesting to see if there are still descendants from the same families. Pat and Kathleen had some good luck in Seingbousse, finding several of their family names. An interesting discovery came at Boustroff, where they had an outdoor shed, something like a corn crib, filled with the people’s bones removed from graves to allow the plots to be reused. Kind of eerie. This is the first time we have seen this despite three previous trips, although an explanatory note nearby suggests this was a fairly common practice in this part of the world.

CAUTION - If you are squeamish at the site of human bones, you may want to skip the next couple of pictures. The second picture also shows the plaques that were removed from the tombstones.

For lunch we stopped at a village market and most of us grabbed some snacks from the vendors. Others ate a a sandwich shop. The afternoon went quite quickly and we were at the hotel ahead of schedule at 4:30. We decided to take the bus for supper because there was nowhere suitable very nearby. We decided to try a crepe restaurant and everyone seemed pretty satisfied. We had a pleasant evening of socializing, not returning to the hotel until 9. These evenings are always interesting. Not only do you have the usual difficulty of deciding what to order, you have additional challenge of trying to figure out what is on the foreign language menu. It takes a while, but it adds to the fun and helps everyone to get to know one another.

Here is my meal - a crepe loaded with cheese and some fresh tomatoes, topped off with kebab meat and sauce (like tatzicki sauce). Some of us jumped directly to dessert, and some had the meal and and dessert, but I am not mentioning any names.

Sorry, still no pictures. Just have not had time to troubleshoot.