PART 1
Each year our city organizes a trip for their seniors. This year they had chosen to visit Compiegne
We left Waterloo at 7 am and made a breakfast stop half way.
We were offered a cup of coffee and a croissant.
Then we continued and stopped for lunch in a charming little village, Pierrefonds, which is overlooked by the imposing Medieval Castle of the Sleeping Beauty.
The restaurant is located in a park of 5.5 hectares of greenery and forest, bordered by the thermal water lake.
The lunch was delicious. The starter was a paté de hare, the main course a leg of a guinea fowl and Sauerkraut. The dessert was a Norwegian omlette.
the entrance
and the surroundings.
After this delicious lunch, the bus took us to the Clairiere de l'Armistice a war memorial commemorating the armistice with the signature of the Germans that ended World War I in 1918. During World War II, Adolf Hitler deliberately chose the same location to sign the Second Armistice at Compiègne after Germany won the Battle of France.
You can visit four main attractions: the Glade of the Armistice with a statue of Ferdinand Foch, the Alsace-Lorraine Memorial, the Clearing of the Armistice, also called Rethondes Clearing, and a replica of a train car.
This year is the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, which finally came with the signing of the Armistice in a railway carriage in the middle of a wood 80 kilometres north east of Paris on 11th November 1918.
After three months of closure the museum on this highly significant historic site, containing a replica of the original railway carriage and many artifacts, documentation and photographs explaining the events, it was reopened with a new 500m² extension to its original 1927 building.
Unfortunately we couldn't visit the museum we had not enough time. But the site itself was very interesting.
I didn't take my helicopter to take this photo, but found it somewhere on internet. At least it gives you an idea of the whole site.
Memorials
The site and the rails
The museum from far
The museum which contains the replica of the wagon in which the armistice was signed, the original had been destroyed in Berlin in 1945 on the orders of Hitler.
The replica
The entrance
and just besides stood the
Renault FT 17 WW1 tank “General Estienne”
A view on the General Foch monument.
Brussels Time
