Europe 2004: Post 1 - Cambridge

While in England, we decided to take a day-trip to Cambridge. Around London, most transportation is by train (not subway, actual train) if you're going to the surrounding towns. So I'm sure we took a train, but we also took a bus. Anyway, we eventually got there.

As in some major American cities, there were lots of tourism companies that had buses. So we bought All-Day Passes, which means for that day, you can get on & off these buses however many times you want. There's a set route that stops at ALL the major tourist areas of interest, and the buses all run on the same route... so if you want to spend more time at one stop, you can just catch a later bus, and if you don't want to get off at all, you only have to stop long enough to let people off.

Anyway, Cambridge was AMAZING. It's got that classic, small-town English feel to it. It's definitely an older town, established hundreds of years ago. Of course, in the UK, you can drink at 18 and social drinking is almost expected, so we saw the famous pub-crawl streets, where you go from one pub to the next. We didn't get off there. ;-)

There was 1 thing I REALLY wanted to do while in Cambridge: go to the American Military Cemetery. It's basically a piece of land that was given to the U.S. to bury our war dead in World War II, although there may be people from other wars there, I don't remember. That piece of land is, essentially, part of the U.S. and I wanted to go there to pay my respects. Although it is generally expected in modern times that our war dead will be returned home for burial, that wasn't the case before advances in transportation & the way wars were fought.

Imagine going off to war KNOWING that if you die - which was very likely - you probably would NEVER come home, not even in a body bag. Imagine sending your loved one - your son, husband, father, brother - off to war, then getting the dreaded knock. Then imagine being told that you would NEVER be given the chance to bury them, and that only by traveling to Europe would you so much as be able to lay a flower on his grave.

I owed these men & women my freedom, my very way of life. And no matter what it took, if I was anywhere near their resting place, I was going to go & honor them.

So we got off the tour bus at the cemetery, and were told that if we missed our bus in 1 hour, we'd be there for 4 hours, and if we missed that one, we'd be there overnight! Now, this cemetery was in the middle of nowhere - literally - so we had a little under 1 hour. We spent that time walking the aisles of servicemen & women, and spent time at the wall listing the dead, similar to the Vietnam War Memorial Wall. And we spent time in the chapel. I knelt before the cross, and prayed for those who had loved ones buried there, for those fighting at that very SECOND for our freedom, and thanking God for them & their victories. It was somber, too short, but one of the most fulfilling things we did over there. Actually, it was probably the most important.

It beat seeing the ENTIRE Royal Family in person, it beat the castles, palaces, and monuments, it beat the Eiffel Tower, it beat Versailles, and it reminded me that freedom isn't free.

So after we payed our respects & signed the Visitor's Book, we continued our exploration of Cambridge. It was a lovely day, and certainly worth the money, time, and energy. I highly recommend a day-trip to Cambridge if you're in the area! Even just riding on the open second level of the double-decker bus, taking pictures of the area & the University buildings, was lovely!

If I can figure out the whole "watermark" thing, I'll post pictures not just of Cambridge but also of the American Military Cemetery since most of my readers are American. The most humbling thing that day was to read not one, but MANY graves marked this way:

a simple white cross, with the inscription:
"Here Lies In Honored Glory An American Soldier, Known But To God."

More stories to come, most of them funny & interesting rather than "heavy," but I thought it important to share this part of the trip and to remind my fellow Americans that freedom is NEVER free.