Friday (July 17, 2009), Mark and I took a one-day trip to the Ardennes.
Mark was with the Big Red One and served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He never had been to Belgium before, so it was a nice opportunity to show him some of the highlights.
We drove from my home to Bastogne.
At the McAuliffe Square, we saw the newly restored Sherman tank.
It used to have markings of the 4th Armored Division on it (in fact, the 704th TD Bn Association paid for its restoration two years in a row!), but it is nice to see it now has its original markings of the 11th Armored Division again.
This tank bogged down and was ko'd by a Panzerfaust in January 1945.
General McAuliffe's Memorial.
Marker of the "Road to Freedom" that starts at Utah Beach.
From Bastogne center, we went to the Mardasson Memorial.
Before you get to the Memorial, you see this beautiful monument to the 101st Airborne Division.
From there, we went on to the Peace Woods which sure has grown since the last time I was there.
Almost every tree there is dedicated to a GI.
In the middle, there are markers of every unit that fought in the Ardennes.
And from the air, the woods look like the logo of UNICEF.
Here, I looked up the name plate of Thomas Vella who was a Signalman in the 101st Airborne Signal Company.
He got killed in a glider crash not far from my hometown on September 17, 1944.
