July 19- Waterloo

Napoleon had a great disaster because he went to Waterloo. We felt like we weren’t far behind.

We had to face the reality that we couldn’t cram in all the things we had been hoping to do. It wasn’t realistic for us to drive into Amsterdam today AND get to where we wanted to be tonight. So Anna Frank wasn’t going to be able to visit the Anne Frank house this trip. We also had to put in a long day of driving today, so that Paris and the last week of plans would fit. Dad actually apologized to the girls at breakfast today, because he knew it meant a long ride in the car for them.

So we started on our way through Holland and almost immediately met frustration. Before we left our hotel, the three girls went to the restroom next to the reception desk. As they went to leave, Julie found that the door lock on the stall was stuck, and she couldn’t turn it. She and Emma were both locked in it together. Anna had to be sent to the reception desk to get help, and even the receptionist had trouble opening the door. It was a traumatic experience for the two in the stall, apparently. Julie gets a little claustrophobic sometimes, and said her heart was racing, and her hands were shaking afterwards. It didn’t help matters that Emma was crying and saying, “I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” The morning hadn’t started well.

A new system of signs meant that we had to accustom ourselves to looking for the signs in new places. The Dutch put their direction signs right in the middle of the traffic circle! Who does that? We also faced frustrations with the road construction we encountered. More than once, we started off thinking we knew how to go and the entry ramp to the expressway would be blocked, and we’d have to find a new route on the cruddy AAA map.

So far, no European country has labeled its routes with directions. If you want to go on the Thruway at home, you really only need to know one thing: East or West? Sure, sometimes you might say “towards Erie” or “towards Albany”, but you’ve always got the other designations to fall back on. If you’re in a part of the United States that you don’t know and you get lost, you can still be heading in the right direction if you follow the signs north or south, east or west. You just plain can’t do that in Europe. All of the road signs are labeled with the towns that they head towards, and nothing else. Oftentimes, there isn’t a route number either. That means you have to be searching the map constantly, trying to figure out which towns are going to be the ones that you have to head towards. That’s extremely frustrating because you guess that it will be the next city up the road, it will end up being the small town next door. That’s part of what makes the AAA maps so frustrating. Since they don’t list all of the small towns, you’re left staring at them and blinking (or swearing) as the traffic circle’s signs go by. It might be an OK system for the locals, but they already know where they’re going. Anyone else who visits the area has to constantly be aware of the town names around him and the directions that they are all in. It’s even worse when the language is different. The German towns were something we could deal with but in Holland, we’ve seen to many vowels and Js and Rs. They all sound like goobledy gook to us. Imagine not being from Buffalo, trying to follow signs like these, and all of a sudden having to figure out whether you need to head in the direction of Tonawanda, Lackawanna, or Cheekotwaga, especially if your handy AAA map only lists one or two of those. That’s what much of the trip today has been like.

Holland is flat. Very flat. At one point last night, Julie commented that the architecture of the houses had changed. Scott simply looked left and right and left and right and left and right, very slowly. At that particular moment, it seemed like you could actually see for several miles in every direction, and it was nothing but fields and a few cows, and maybe a modern windmill or three. There was not a building of any kind to be seen anywhere. Julie wanted to pinch Scott for his ability to make fun of her statement without saying anything.

There were actually some picturesque parts of Holland but we were lost when we were passing them and were too busy following road signs and trying to read maps to take any pictures or videos. We passed over several canals. We saw a few of the old-style windmills, the kind that you think of when you think of Holland. The one we got closest to was also at the spot where traffic was stopped for a drawbridge to go down. It had just let a boat through the canal lock. We saw lots of animals. There were sheep, cows, sheep with cows, goats, sheep with goats, sheep, a few camels, and sheep. We don’t know what the camels were doing there.

It’s been varying from rain to sun and back again over and over today. We’ve lost count of how many times.

We made it through to Belgium and entered our second country today. Belgium was only a little bit better than Holland as far as signs go. We made our way to Brussel where we found a rest-stop shopping area that sold the things we needed for some ham sandwiches and ate lunch as we rode.

Anna had been sitting in the trunk up until lunch. Julie discovered yesterday that there is the possibility of a third row of seats if you lift up the bottom of the trunk. She had noticed them because of the seat belts that were there. That gave the girls the novelty of being able to ride in the back and the ability for us to split them up on these really long drives. All four of us appreciated that. After our lunch stop, it was Emma’s turn. They’ve been doing pretty good in the car, in spite of the long drive today. When we were gathering our things at the end of the day, Anna said she had her three necessities-- her candy, her Fanta, and her DS.

Our touring for today was at the Waterloo Battlefield. We were optimistically hoping to get there by 1:00. It was actually more like 4:30 when we arrived. We had a little trouble finding it because we followed signs into the town itself. Once we finally got out of town to the south, there was actually a lot to see.

There’s a cluster of buildings near what was the center of the British lines, and they gave the battlefield a “Gettysburg” feel to us. (That’s good.) The first building has a gift shop with a large selection of books and goodies (Hooray! says Scott). You can buy several different ticket packages there. We didn’t have time for the full battlefield tour on a bus, though that would have been fun, but we did just about everything else.

We started our abbreviated but intense Waterloo experience with the “Audio Visual Show.” It’s comparable to the old Electric Map in Gettysburg, but with two interesting twists. It tells the story without narration, because of the diverse groups of people that come here from France, Britain, Germany, and all over. It also has a series of slides that accompany the changing map. The slides and the music make the phases of the battle not to hard to follow-- the opening of the fight near Hougoumont, the various infantry and cavalry engagements, the arrival of the Prussians on the battlefield to aid the British, and the eventual defeat of the French, down to the famous “Last French Square.”

The next phase of the tour of the battlefield is a film made up of a series of clips from the 1970 movie, “Waterloo.” It stars Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer (aka Captain von Trapp) as Wellington. The movie does an amazing job of staging the battle, and even tops “Gettysburg” that way. The various phases of the battle were covered again in the film. Oddly, the British soldiers were dubbed over in French, but subtitles in several languages linked the scenes together. Scott was excited to see these scenes again, because he loaned his copy to a friend back in Petersburg and never got it back. He hasn’t seen the movie itself since then, because it’s currently not available in America. That’s hard to understand, because it is a great film. It was available in the gift shop, but Scott was afraid that it wouldn’t play on an American DVD player, plus it was only “full screen” not “wide screen.” That’s a tragedy. He did end up buying several postcards and a booklet about the battlefield. Julie later surprised him with an early anniversary present-- a t-shirt from the battlefield and a pin.

The next stop was the panorama painting. Like other panoramas we’ve visited, at Gettysburg, Atlanta, Moscow, and Volgograd, this painting is done on a canvas that surrounds you for 360 degrees. In some ways, this painting didn’t seem as well done as some of the others, and was showing some kind of damage in places. It certainly hurt that there was no narration to point out the details in this one, but that’s no doubt a result of the diversity of languages among the visitors again. Still, there were times that it did have a disorienting illusion of movement, helped no doubt by the real objects and figures in the foreground that try to add to the appearance of depth.

Following that was a wax museum where the leaders of the armies are featured- Napoleon and his French field marshals and generals, and the three Allied commanders, the Prince of Orange for the Dutch, Wellington for the British, and Blücher for the Prussians. There were also artifacts found on the battlefield. All in all, it was an unexpectedly complete series of museums.

The highlight that dominates the battlefield itself is the “Lion Mound” (or Buttes de Leon, which we naturally referred to as the butt of the lion.) After the battle the Prince of Orange came back and erected this gigantic monument to himself. The mound is 41 m (more than 120 feet ) high and has a statue of a lion on the top overlooking the battlefield. It is quite a climb up, but we made it to the top. Mom and Dad were huffing and puffing, while the girls marched back and forth playing. After admiring the view and taking some pictures we hurried back down, partly because we had more traveling to do, and partly because Emma didn’t want to be around when the re-enactors fired their cannon again.

We had dinner at the only natural place to eat at after doing our battlefielding- the nearby McDonalds. And now we’re in…. France! We found a nice, American style hotel along the expressway on the road to Armiens (in the Somme Valley, where World War I battles were fought). We’ve got a room with two double beds, though Julie misunderstood and asked for a cot as well. They brought up a baby crib. We told Emma it was for her because they heard her yelling when she was trying to scare the birds in the parking lot.