France

There is nothing like spending three days on the Cote d'Azur. All the trouble zwe had in Rennes just melted away. We were able to find an apartment to saty in with a full kitchen. That was great because there was a supermarket up the street and our enitre food buget for the three days here was less then 25€. There was a group from Finland staying in the other room of the aparment and we taught them how to play 31. It feels good to just sit around and not doing anything. That isn't something we had a chance to do yet this summer and Neal and I both needed it. We are meeting Aaron Tournoux in Paris on Saturday and after that it is off to Spain. We visited Monoco, which was unreal. I mean honestly, do you really need a helicopter on your yacht? We also got amazing tans spending 2 days on the beach.

Well, everything was going tip top until today. We spent two night in Paris. The first day was just getting organized and situated but we went up to Sacre Couer
and then down to the Seine to watch the sun set.
Saturday we spent in Chartes which was amazing. The view from, the north bell tower is amazing.

Sunday we took the train out to Bayeux. This was our second ti,e using the rail pass qnd everything went smoothly. We did learn the hard way thought that everything closes in France on Sunday, including super markets. The hostel in Bayeux was in a wonderful old home and had a garden, a library, an outdoor game of ches. It was fairly epmty being a sunday night. I would love to stay there again with more people around; We were hoping to get a tour of the D-Day beaches on Sunday but had to wait until monday morning but it was well worth it. Point du Hoc and the americain cenetery were both beautiful and moving.

This is when the troubles started. Since we did not leave Bayeux until late we missed the last bus from Pontorson to Mont St Michel. Then we got into Rennes but it was too late to coninue onto Le Mans or Tours as we hoped. Then to top things off we tried to book a train from Paris to Nice for later in the week think two days aheqd would be enough. It was not. So now we are not sure what we are going to do. It has been fun, exciting and tiring so far and we are still getting the hang of this whole travelling around with no plans. I am being to think that we may have to give up some flexabilty to make sure we have a place to stay and a way to get there. All in all its been a crazy and fun four days

Also Neal is having trouble with the size of his photos and taking up all of our storage space so for now look on facebook and hopefull we can work it out soon.

This point du hoc. For those of you unfamiliar, this is where the US Army Rangers scaled the cliffside and took out German posts to prepare for D-Day.

An example of a gun, with something like 150mm cannon and a 12 nile range

and after a hard days work of travelling, we checked our email and had dinner...