Posted on 11/10/2006 9:27:43 PM PST by Atlantic Bridge
Tons of mangled cars piled up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon de Verdon in Provence are sombre evidence of France's high suicide rate. But on a brighter note, engineers now clearing the accumulated wreckage of 100 years are uncovering a veritable auto museum.
The Parc Régional du Verdon is a lush green landscape of deep canyons, thick vegetation and freshwater lakes. Located 90 km northeast of Aix-en-Provence in France's south-eastern Var district, the "Grand Canyon of Verdon" attracts one million nature-loving visitors each year.
Unfortunately, some of them don't return. For decades, cars driven off the cliffs, some accidentally but many intentionally, have been piling up at the foot of the canyon.
It's a graveyard of old automobiles, some of them dating back to the 1930s. No one has bothered to it clean up -- until now. After two years of fund-raising, regional authorities recently completed the first two-week stage of a massive clean-up operation, lifting as much as 20 tonnes of debris out of the canyons.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Post of the day! Hilarious!
The contracted with "les guardes de raille" union sometime around 1930. They'll get around to it when they're done with the smokes and pastisse.
Here is a funny contemporary video from France:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrHWRs5Dcaw
The French have some working German tanks left since they used them after WWII for their millitary. I recommend the half-track for a cruise on 5th Avenue in N.Y. You can be assured that you are the issue of the day then.
It is my recollection that the "Paris Gun" from World War I never did turn up after the end of that war.
I hate it the people felt so despondent that they did themselves in...I just gotta say that first. But my first actual thought was "Oh, I wonder if there's any old Beetle parts down there!!"
BTW did any see the history channel program on Bolivia's Highway of Death ?,
One lane and a 3000ft drop on the side!
Yungas road? try this:
http://javimoya.com/blog/pics/200607/bolivia.htm
Wow! I know the Tiger armor was difficult to penetrate, but it must have been impossible to HIT, too! ;-)
Seriously, thanks for passing on that cool clip! Reading, PA, has a WWII show each year weekend of D-Day, and it always catches me by surprise how different the scales can be on equipment. Anti-tank guns that are only a few feet high, AFVs that I had pictured as large being only 5 feet tall, other AFVs being much larger...
In the 90s, my brother came across a German WWII antitank gun (PaK 38, IIRC) in the basement of a barn in Virginia!
Most of the abandoned tanks were cut up for scrap after the war, but Wittmann's tank was hit by a bomb or rocket, so there wasn't much left anyway. I don't have the link to the halftrack series, sorry. There's also one of a T-34 with german markings being pulled from a lake in Latvia, (I think), and another one of an FW-190 being lifted from a Norwegian fjord.
Central Market... Wish we had them here in Los Angeles... It has become a family tradition to fly into San Antonio at Thanksgiving, get off the plane, rent a car and go to central market, shop for an hour and then hightail it to the parents place in the Hill Country...
I'll be doing that in a about two weeks....
I believe the Germans destroyed the Paris gun(s) to keep them out of enemy hands.
That's the assumption, but the Allies were never able to prove it.
" The Allies searched in vain for the guns during the German retreat of August 1918 onwards and after the armistice, but in vain. No example of the Paris Gun has been located then or since although U.S. forces located one of the gun's spare mountings."
http://www.firstworldwar.com/atoz/parisgun.htm
Actually, evidence points to a Firefly hit, and the reason there wasn't much left was the detonation of the ammo onboard.
Still, the finds of the remains of both the tank and crew nearly 4 decades apart were of note.
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