Europe 2015

Here are some quick stories that I generated with pictures from the trip my friend Murray and I took to Europe at the end of June. It was ostensibly for a science conference in Paris, but that was only for a few days. The rest was sightseeing, walking, visiting war memorials, and touring the red light district in Amsterdam. 

Each story below is a link that should open in a new window - if that doesn't work for you, I have pasted the text link below each picture. You can click on it or copy/paste it into your browser to zip over to Google's new photo service.

All the photos are in roughly chronological order within each "story" (a fun feature of the new Google Photos app), except where I had forgotten to change the time zone with my camera... I can't seem to change the order of pictures within the story, but I hope that this will be a feature added to the app in the future. 

Enjoy!

https://goo.gl/photos/wH2jJ5DDAThJCurz9

https://goo.gl/photos/vxRczRtrYsMK5DHb6

https://goo.gl/photos/hPH7xUH1mouJcHTJ6

https://goo.gl/photos/Zvh8R36xBoTEAT1E7

https://goo.gl/photos/3Q6NKLhzX5u6wPbZA

https://goo.gl/photos/c2UBWDE4fLYRnEaR6

https://goo.gl/photos/xpJFnGVgakAqtaj38

https://goo.gl/photos/jwomZfDXa1o7dkxj7

https://goo.gl/photos/oUYxJ8bJTEMfnEMM6

https://goo.gl/photos/UP6rX6N8NyDGCozJA

Bonus story!!!

https://goo.gl/photos/CmBhvA8vbupXYKv19

Juno Beach and the D-Day landing areas

Here is another shot from the Mont as we prepared to leave in the morning 

After seeing signs and reading that overnight parking would be 14 euro,  we were shocked to find that it cost just over 4 euro. Again, typical of the French... signs thst don't quite match reality.

We drove north directly to the Juno beach (avoiding tolls and seeing many small villages).  After seeing so many cars the day before, I was surprised again by an unusual car. This smart car is a type I had never seen before

Here I am on Juno Beach. We were both somewhat disappointed with the Canadian Juno Beach Centre, as it focused on what Canada was like through the war and up the current times. We wanted to see things about what the Canadians did - we didn't come to France to learn about the geography and social structure of Canada!

We drove around to many different memorials in the area, including some German defensive bunkers.

We found many moving memorials and cemeteries and stopped every few minutes to explore.

We later drove east towards Vimy and found a few WW1 sites before arriving at Amiens to check into the hotel.

We were late again for dinner and had few choices - we ended up going to McDonald's! In France they seem to use a different colour scheme than everywhere else. Their key colour is green rather than red. Below is a machine where we ordered our food - including a beer! - and they delivered it right to our table.  I can't believe McDonald's at home would ever do table service. Much of the menu was quite unfamiliar and interesting, including mayonnaise on the fries.

Right near our hotel was one of the ubiquitous traffic circles with, of all things, a pizza making vending machine!

Interesting list evening in France.