Scott's narration of the trip so far ..

(At Hougoumont, a critical objective for Napoleon at Waterloo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hougoumont)

Scott writes: Ed and I spent yesterday touring the battlefield at Verdun, France, yesterday after spending the previous roaming the rolling fields at Waterloo, where Napoleon met his match against allied Dutch, English and Prussian forces and the end of the French empire commenced. 
It was atop a wide, forested mountain at Verdun that the French and German armed forces threw everything they had at one another--including a fantastic 60 million artillery shells--over three years, 1915-1918. 

More than 300,000 soldiers died and another 450,000 were maimed in the most brutal trench warfare of WWI. In one 10-hour period, the Germans unleashed 1 million mortars and artillery rounds on their despised enemy, churning an entire forest and covering the crater-scape with the body parts of thousands of terrified French troops. The forest has recovered, its trees right now covered in the most glorious fall colors, but the forest floor for perhaps 10 square miles looks like deep, grassy moguls. It appears not a single square meter escaped the fusillades. A sea of crosses covers an area that took me 20 minutes to cross on foot, and inside a monstrous grey monument were entombed the remains of 130,000 more casualties of Verdun battles--give or take 10,000, a note indicates, because most of the dead arrived in pieces. 
I suddenly have an urge for another coffee. Today, we drive from Luxembourg, where we spent last night in a handsome hotel after dining on spaghetti and mussels at a trendy restaurant on a road named after Gen. Patton, two blocks or so from a boulevard named after JFK, to Bastogne, Belium, and Arnhem, Holland, and then Amsterdam, where we'll turn in car, board a plane, and dine tonight in Barcelona. Gonna be another helluva day. We're having a ball and seeing and experiencing so much. We're thinking we'll rest a little in Barcelona, but neither of us believes it.