Valeversary, Day 2 - Reims & Metz

As you know, if you've read much of this blog or have seen many of my pictures, I love cathedrals. There are two famous ones on the way home from Paris, so we decided to take a leisurely drive back home from Disneyland and stop in at the cathedrals of Reims and Metz. Reims also has the Surrender Room, which I'll tell you about in a minute.

Since we knew breakfast at the hotel sucked monkey butt, we skipped it in favor of breakfast at a gas station, since we needed to get gas anyway. I was going to eat my sandwich from the night before, but it was completely frozen. So, we found a gas station and got gas and breakfast.

You may recall in my previous posts me talking about bringing Dew with me on trips, so I would have my morning caffeine (I don't like coffee). Well, that was often difficult. Not many hotels have refrigerators, and even fewer have ice. warm Dew is gross. Or, I have the opposite problem and leave them in the car to freeze, as my sandwich had done. Well, I discovered a wonderful new product at the commissary. Caffeinated cocoa mix! I can mix it with hot water, which is almost always available at hotel breakfasts for tea. If that's not available, I can mix it with a wee bit of coffee (mostly chocolate with just a bit of coffee isn't too gross) and milk. Voila! Easy caffeine.

Back to breakfast. There were whole coolers full of sandwiches and such, but not too much breakfast stuff. But, we found some. Em got Nutella crepes, and I got quiche Lorraine. I don't remember what Max got. Em's crepes were nasty, she said, so I'm glad we had other snacks in the car. My quiche was pretty good, but the eggs were a strange texture. It made me fear that they weren't completely cooked. But, I couldn't find (in my limited French) on the package anywhere that looked like it said it needed to be cooked, so I just ate it. I didn't get sick, so I guess they were fully cooked. Em had some, too, and was OK.

The first city on the way home is Reims. We first went to the Surrender Room, because it is closed for a couple of hours at lunch, so we wanted to get there before that. It's pretty cool. It's actually a small museum comprised of several rooms. But, the main one was used as Eisenhower's war control room during WWII, and it's where, on May 7, 1945, the Allies received the unconditional surrender of the Nazis. Unfortunately, it's got a big plexiglass wall, which wreaks havoc on pictures. The main room still has all the maps on the wall from that day.

The Surrender Room

The upper big sign is for Mainz! It says there's a tank farm.

The other rooms of the museum house quite a bit of WWII memorabilia.It was pretty darn cool to see where WWII ended.

I had no idea the Michelin Guide was so old

The Cathedral was next.

The cathedral parking structure was closed, for some reason, so we had a bit of a wander to find parking. It wasn't too bad, though. I know this cathedral is probably special for some reason or another, but it mostly just looked like another cathedral to me. Not that that's a bad thing. I love cathedrals.

This one did have some pretty Chagall windows, though.

And, I always love rose windows.

It also had some stone angels that could very easily have been from Dr. Who.

Don't blink!

There were a few other things that looked cool in Reims, but it seems they were all closed for lunch, so we decided to just move on to Metz. I really liked the Metz cathedral from the outside, because it was a pretty buttery sort of color that I hadn't seen before. Maybe it was just the light, but I don't think so.

Inside, it's very light. That's because it has 70,000 sq. ft. of windows, the most of any cathedral in the world. Some of them were pretty spectacular, too.

Notice how you can see all the way down on the ceiling? Compare that to the picture of Reims above

My favorites were on a little side chapel.

It also had a very lovely rose window

We were pretty hungry by this point, but we had a hard time finding lunch. Only a couple of restaurants were open in the area, and we were about out of cash, so we needed one that took a card. The one place that had a Visa sign on the door was completely full, and they looked at us like we were idiots to even walk in the door. So, we just got some lunch at the gas station in Saarbrucken when we got back into Germany. Luckily, it was a gas station that had a real restaurant. We love Serways gas stations. A couple of hours later, we were home. :)

Emma says - There was a lot of driving and a lot of gas station food, which I'm pretty used to from our other trips. It was pretty cool to see where WWII ended, because I love the show Hetalia, which is mostly set during that time period. So, I'm interested in WWII history. I've said everything that can be said about cathedrals. They were cathedrals. They were big and pretty and like every other cathedral I've ever seen.