EuroTrip 1.0 part 4

The last part of this amazing school trip brought us to Normandy. This being an educational trip this part of the trip we visited a lot of the Canadian war memorials.

We visited the Juno Beach memorial. It is not only a gorgeous beach filled with Canadian history but they have built a lovely museum which brings us through the whole lot of emotions, such as sadness for the lives lost and pride for our nation. It had beautiful artifacts and a nice interactive display, with wall that give us a chance to leave our opinions and feeling on this day.

Following our visit to Juno we also went to Dieppe, another site where Canadian soldiers played a big part during WWII, everywhere we went in the little town we were warmly greeted and commented thanks to our Canadian Flag pins and badges.

Continuing our tour of Normandy, we went back to Canada. Well technically we visited the Vimmy Ridge memorial which is on Canadian Soil in France. It was kind of grim walking along the wall and actually seeing my grand-mother's maiden name on the wall, it's not something we talked about in our family, I did not know I had ancestors who had gone to war. Some of my friends also saw some of their family names.

Before we left we were all assigned the name of a soldier. It gave us time to do some research on this soldier and do a little something special. For my soldier I didn't want to bring just a little flag but i found a Canada pinwheel. I also brought a bag of dirt to place onto his grave so that he could be buried in Canadian soil.

We got to Belgium and visited trenches mostly dedicated to the Nova-Scotian soldiers.

One of my friends had a great idea before leaving, she contacted our local Legion and got 3 reefs to place at the memorials. The legion shipped them to the hotels where we stayed and at each big memorial site we place one in memory of our fallen soldiers.

Our last stop was Brussels where we prepared to get onto the plane to come home, when we landed in Toronto we all feared that our plane was going to be delayed due to more snow, luckily we made it home.

There are a few things I learned on this trip that I can remember.
1. Don't go on long exploration trips with lots of friends, you will fight
2. Alone time is golden
3. Don't over pack. (I ended up throwing clothes away)
4. Don't buy souvenirs for everyone you left at home
5. If you love it and it's not crazy expensive buy it (I still regret not buying those blue boots)

Back to reality, next story will be even further back in my memory but will still bring up that warm fuzzy feeling.

Until the next adventure, Tata!