La Roche-en-Ardenne

We’d arrived last evening to a campground just outside the town of La Roche-en-Ardenne after the office had closed but a fellow had let us through the gate and told us to register in the morning.
61D03DB6-7F52-44C0-8F4E-A2853715375F
The campground is right on a very pretty river that has a large berm – meant to keep floods at bay – and it’s a nice walk along the top, with the odd bench here and there. The weather changed completely more than once throughout the morning – clouds, sun, rain – but always windy.
E3E13329-2EA7-4165-8955-14E04EE35A10
Later in the afternoon we drove into the town – it’s very pretty, but I guess was almost completely rebuilt after WWII.
75B01685-3055-4A71-B1A4-9C9224A3ECF5
There is more than one US tank on display, and a fairly large war museum, as well as the usual memorial.
619F3FC0-9C27-4797-A354-E0569ADF8F7D
This area was heavily bombed by the Americans in the war to force the Germans to flee, and the town was a very important river crossing location during the Battle of the Bulge.
165DAE88-E2A6-4D76-8DEC-089566292C07
Many of the roads in the city centre are pedestrian friendly so walking around was quite relaxing – there are sculptures and artwork all over the place.


We stopped at a nice cafe/bar near one of the squares for a drink and waiting for the rain to diminish a bit.
C038C5B3-2AA3-430E-B234-A6F9E537D511
As we passed the war museum the fellow was just about to take in the outside sign but waited a moment so I could take a photo of it. The town before the war in the top left corner and then the after – not much was left.
53080E6C-1A0E-4DF3-9E94-BBEFBFD6EAB0
But they did a great job rebuilding, and the place seems prosperous and busy enough even on a rainy day in April.
EC353023-CD54-44D3-88A9-A7136EB7DD7D

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s