Lorraine: The Maginot Line

The region of Lorraine butts up against Germany, Luxembourg, and Belgium. It is the only region of France to border on three countries. Furthermore, the borders of Lorraine are not naturally created by barriers such as rivers or high mountains. You can pretty much just walk across the the border into France. Historically, this has proved to be a bad thing.

The Maginot Line was built by France in the 1920s and 30s to prevent other countries (well, one other country) from walking across the border unopposed. In 1914, the Germans mobilized so fast and moved so quickly that they were nearly to Paris before the French army could organize to stop them. The Maginot Line was intended to stop, or at least slow down, any invasion before it reached the heart of France.

The line is not a continuous structure, like a wall or a trench. Rather, it is a series of individual bunkers and gun emplacements. You can find Maginot Line structures all up and down the border, going quite a bit south of Strasbourg. However, the most and the biggest of the fortifications were placed along the Lorraine frontier. In the largest outposts, they had tunneled out living quarters and workshops and warehouses served by self-contained railways and powerplants.
We stumbled across a Maginot museum near Simserhof. The tunnels are really cool if you are into engineering and gadgetry. The are also very cool in the literal sense, with the temperatures in the tunnels running about 40 degrees F.

The most interesting part of the visit was the hike through the woods to actually get to the museum. You see, the visible part of the defences were on the top of a hill facing to the East. The entry to the museum was at the bottom of the hill on the backside, where they had built the entries for the access tunnels. So, from the parking lot is was a 15 minute hike down the hill on slippery paths through the forest.
At least that's what I thought. In actuality, when we got to the bottom of the hill there was a parking lot that you could drive to by taking another route. The picture below shows Theresa after she came out of the woods and saw the parking lot. She looked at the parking lot, then looked back up the path, then looked at me in the moment the camera caught her picture. You may not be able to recognize the look on her face, but I can. I know it well. This is the look that tells me I am in trouble.