Band of Brothers…

Bonjour, tout le monde! It's Hump Day, and boy, am I feeling it! Because we have a fabulous cruise planned for my Birthday week, I've found that I've become quite restless and antsy, and I just want to get myself on a boat so I can sail away to new lands, STAT!

In order to help push through this Hump Day, I thought I'd share a weekend day trip with ya'll!

One of the great resources we have as a military family overseas is a never-ending stream of tours from the USO. That means, we get to hop on a super comfy bus, and be driven all over creation to see cool stuff with a snazzy tour guide. Since Soldier Boy and I are, essentially, polar opposites, it is sometimes a bit tricky for us to find things that we both want to learn about (getting him into an art museum is like asking him to take a trip to Hell and back) we often rely on our mutual love of WWII history.

He's really into the battle tactics and weapons and stuff and I'm all about the human interest side of things, and together, we totally make it work. Because we'd had such a fabulous time in Normandy in July, we settled upon giving the "Band of Brothers" USO tour a go.

This tour looked great on paper. It visited the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, the German Military Cemetery in Luxembourg, had a random pit stop in a town with a castle and an American tank, and then plowed on to Bastogne (Belgium) to see a US monument, the Belgian bunkers where all the heavy-hitting officers made their battle plans, and had a quick dip into the Bois Jacques, where the Band of Brothers dug foxholes and fought. This was to be interspersed by episodes of Band of Brothers that took place in the locations we were visiting all with the accompaniment of a knowledgeable tour guide.

I'll just say that it was lovely to be out of the house on a beautiful day. We got to have each meal of the day in a different country, which is always a bonus in my book, and we had a lovely time in one another's company, but our tour guide couldn't complete a thought if his life depended on it and we only got to spend about 10 minutes in the foxholes (which is what we were most looking forward to seeing and could have spent at least an hour in them).

That being said, here are some snaps!