Normandy Day 1: Driving

The nice thing about blogger... I can write a post daily if possible, save them, and post them when we get home. So, I'm writing these posts daily, and will post them one at a time when we get home. Enjoy! :)

Today there was not much to report. We drove, for 8 hours, to get to our Gites. One great thing was while driving, we kept passing cars towing USA jeeps/tanks from WWII. It actually had me in tears at one point seeing all of these go down the road, knowing we were going the same way.

We are staying at a beautiful farmhouse, La Noette, where we have our own gite. A gite is sort of an apartment connected to the farmhouse, but we have a kitchen, our own bathroom, balcony with patio, etc. The farmhouse is gorgeous, with a nice garden the kids had fun running around in. There is also a goose, which is quite the character, and some chickens. The kids think it's hilarious to meet a goose, since we often say "You silly goose!" to them. The kids are having a blast.

Driving here, we were very surprised by the number of tolls. EIGHT Toll booths, totaling €52!!! Ouch! We're hoping to go home another way and avoid Paris, as Paris traffic was horrible. We had plans to spend a little bit of the afternoon in Lisieux, but we decided we did not have enough time to go there and make it worthwhile, so would head there another day.

Once we arrived to the farmhouse, we unloaded the car and went in to the town to stop at the grocery store. There, Zach proceeded to run in the grocery store, trip, and break a jar of jelly! Oh fun times. Thankfully it didn't shatter, so we bought it anyway and didn't cause a scene.

We also found the city's church is Catholic. Unfortunately, there were absolutely no signs, other than when the office was open. Boo! We looked online and found one place that said mass was at 9am and the other said 11am. So, our plan is to attempt to go to the 9am here, then go to Lisieux. If there is no 9am mass, then there is a 10:30 and 11am mass in the Basilllica and Cathedral in Lisieux. We will spend the rest of the day in Lisieux.

While driving here, I realized I did not look up any events for the D-Day Anniversary on Thursday. So, we thankfully have internet and I did some research. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we'll be able to do much, but we hope to see the men in 1944 uniforms parachute out of C47 one night, and hope to go to an ecumenical ceremony at the American Military Ceremony on the 6th.

With that said, it's time to head to bed for our full week ahead!

Day 2, Day 3