Our friends Cory & Mary and their son Nate came to finish off our summer visitors. Katie missed them entirely as she was in Norway visiting her best friend from school in Brussels who has returned to Norway. She loved her time there and came home full of stories of eating moose meat tacos and lots of deer meat too. (Her friend Astrid's father is a hunter)
Here they are by a Viking ship and on an old polar ship called the Fram.
A Norwegian sunset...
We are all sad to see Astrid return to Norway, we hope she will continue to visit us when she can!
Charlie traded Katie in for his big brother Nate. I started back to work the week they were here so he pretty much spent his days with Nate and was delighted to not have to share him with anyone. Kelly joined them when she could but she was trying to get her summer assignments done for school.
 |
| They loved climbing up onto the garage roof and hanging out in their spot. |
 |
| One night we even delivered pizza up to them so they could eat a boys dinner on the roof! |
 |
| Mary and her own Belgian chocolate namesake! |
We saw the cemetery at Tyne Cot, very beautiful memorial to all the Commonweath soldiers. Kelly pointed out that the South African Regiment soldiers had the symbol of Nancy the Springbok. I have a WWI medallion from a SA hat with the same image.
 |
| A very beautiful, sad place. |
 |
| Louna continued to visit many places in Europe that dogs might not be allowed...she wasn't allowed in the American cemetery near Luxembourg, but here she was able to explore with us. |
Our next stop was the Passchendaele Museum, which was another gorgeous place in an area that saw so many senseless deaths in WWI. Here is a link to the museum website which will do a better job explaining all that is there. It was very well done.
 |
| In the dugout |
Louna and I explored the rememberance garden while the rest of the crew saw the museum. They had a garden for each country that sent soldiers to fight here. What was interesting was the one to the US was mainly about the war effort to provide food aid to Belgium. Here is the plaque..
 |
| Its always nice to see the good work that the US does around the world recognized! |
Louna and I needed a little break from the sadness so we broke it up with a fun side trip to a bread vending machine in the tiny town...
 |
| I got a loaf of white and a loaf of brown..super cool! |
Our next stop was the town of Yper only a few miles down the road. Mary was able to sweet talk the lady into letting them into the museum for a speedy tour of the Flanders Field Museum before they closed....but she did have to beg!
Charlie lost his mind over the carnival outside the museum in the main square...he scoped out this game to play after dinner!
 |
| With the buglers who play the Last Post |
 |
| Mini replica of the Menin Gate, it is very large so hard to photograph it all |
 |
Had to take a picture of the O'Brien J soldier...not sure what the story behind the two names is? We just happened to be standing under this group of names during the ceremony. |
A final photo to end this post...we saw this horse in a zebra blanket on our way to Yper in the morning, after all the South Africa days seeing real zebras in our neighborhood we all got a kick out of seeing this Belgian Zebra!
We were very sorry to see our friends go, we had such a great time exploring with them and telling old stories. Mary really remembered some funny ones about Kelly especially how she used to love playing Candyland. Thankfully she has given that up!
Nate and Charlie had us all playing nightly games of Knockout on our basketball hoop, sadly I never took a picture as I was too busy trying to win...but we have kept up Nate's tradition and have had some great family knockout games since they have left. We hope they will return again so we can have some rematches!
No comments:
Post a Comment