Still Trying to Catch Up (with pictures!)

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Hey all, Drea and I are in Rome now and having a great time, except for the fact that it takes forever to get around in the city. Anyway, back to where I left off last time (with some pictures from earlier times).

Mont St Michel

After our happy reunion we headed to Mt St Michel. We stayed at a campsite there, but in these little shacks that had no running water. They were pretty comfortable though, and while we had very good weather for the first time, it still got pretty cold at night and the shack was only slightly more expensive than a tent site would have been. We spent the next few days in the area, checking out MtStMichel, renting bikes and going for a little ride through the beautiful countryside and just generally enjoying the good weather. MtStM is an amazing place, very fun to wander through the tiny passages and check out the views. There's not a lot of water around it like you see in all the photos, but apparently they've got a huge engineering project underway to try and restore the maritime character of the place. Of course I was very interested in that so I had to go and check out the little kiosk they'd set up explaining their plans. If you're interested you should do a search on it, it's a very cool plan involving a renovation for the whole area. After a few days there, the weather turned to it's standard raininess and we headed for Bayeux.

Bayeux

Our main goals here were to visit some D-Day sites and to see the famous Bayeux Tapestry. If you're not familiar with it, it's a very long tapestry telling the story of William the Conqueror's invasion of England in 1066. Not only is it very well perserved and slightly comical at times, it's one of the last representations of Viking-style tapestries (William being a Norman, who were originally Vikings). So it was great to connect with some of my ancestal heritage :-). We saw the tapestry on the first day, and while the free audio guide was informative, it rushed you along a bit quickly. I took the time to fill Drea in on some of the background of the whole story, because you know I love to show off my knowledge of history...

The next day we took a bus out to the Omaha Beach American Cemetary from WWII. A note to anyone planning on visiting D-Day sites: the buses that run there are not made for tourists, but for local students so they only run in the mornings and late afternoons. If you want to see more than one site in a day, either rent a car or go on a tour. Anyway, we made our way there and went to the visitor's center and the graveyard itself. The whole place is very well done, absolutely not touristy it all, in fact, almost no facilities except a few restrooms. The presentations at the visitor's center were really good, and of course the graves with their rows of white crosses are quite powerful. It really made you proud to be an American.

Unfortunately, we saw everything and still had to wait three hours for the next bus. This wouldn't have been so bad, but it was raining pretty hard and as I said, there were no facilities such as restaurants to go hang out at. So we spent a good deal of time in the rain and finally went back to the visitor's center just to have a warm dry place to wait. We finally made it back to Bayeux, headed back to Paris the next day, and got ready to go to Italy the day after that...

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Comments

[Josephus]

Most Excellent
Dude, That is most excellent, tell me when ya get to Amsterdam. Over and Out, Josephus