Hotel de l'Europe Lisieux

... there. It was beautiful, haunting, and eerie to see the sight of where the troupes landed on D-Day. When I was in the museum, I was listening to an interactive audio recording of soldier’s experiences from D-Day, and the first button I happened to push was of a soldier from Mt. Vernon, IL! What a small world. To climb down to the actual beach part of Omaha Beach took awhile. It’s ...

Arrived at Ouistreham just before dark and found an Aire de Service right on the beach and this time it was free! The downside was it was right next to the ferry terminal and the 6am ferry to Portmouth the next day was kill the tranquilo the next morning. Kim's Maison du Scooby cooked up a storm. Pork fajitas on rice - delicious. I gave it 5 stars.

From Rouen we drove to Honfleur, which is a tiny harbour town on the Normandy coast. So so cute!!!! We wandered around checking out the wee boutique shops and eating galeti - yum! Nothing for dinner and as it was Sunday only one little grocery shop was open with not much selection so we opted for a fillet of freshly caught ...

... through the night. 25.09.09 Villers-Bocage N43.04'46" W0.39'38" Our neighbour here was a one-legged Yorkshire ex-policeman from Ireland who with his Irish wife was on his way to Spain where they regularly over-wintered in an almost completely English/Irish community at La Malina? I think he said. He had collected an unpaid 200eu driving fine in Portugal last year and was wondering how he would get on ... 27.09.09 Went to Bayeux hoping to stay but the Aire was closed so ...

... at those beaches because they were the ones that I was most interested in but more of a factor was the day is only so long and I could have spent a day at each beach going to the museums and reading the courageous stories of the brave Allied service men and women.

Well we have erased most of the spiritual healing we received at Mt-St-Michel and while it is depressing to think of all of the lives lost the main emotion is pride. We keep driving to Caen on our way to Paris.

We started this morning planning to visit Honfleur and spend a couple of days here as it is so beautiful. But today it rains, so today it loses!
As the battery is flat too, we simply cast off and drove south west.
On the way out of Cite Europe where we took on some diesel we say a couple of hitchers, and as we were feeling in good spirits we picked them up.
They were quite chatty but after a while we were ...

TomTom is great, expect when you don't have the maps for the country you're in!
We have the full european DVD but loading all the maps onto the phone was one item that did not make it onto my big list of jobs to do before we left.
I still have the DVD with my but no DVD drive!
We have been navigating with googlemaps since ...

The first night was spent in a nice stop on the edge of the old port in Calais.
I've been here before when i did some sailing in my youth so i know it well.
It seemed safe enough as there must have been 50 motorhomes but there was a broken window overnight for someone!
We moved onto honfleur and found a nice stop 2Km from honfleur which was free and had a large football/basketball court for jake to play in

... street. We checked out the fabulous mini-golf course that everyone has been raving about. I was disappointed...no little Eiffel Tower or anything at all resembling France. It's a silly-looking mini-golf where the average age of the person playing didn't exceed the single digits. Daria suggesting going there for my birthday....oh boy :) We kept running and we came across this little petting zoo with goats, sheep, and one peacock (though I'm not sure he was supposed to be there, I ...

... about 10-15 minutes outside of town and use the one they have in the lobby, 3) go to a bar in town that opens at nine p.m. and use theirs for free when you buy a drink. Guess which one we chose? You got it, but we really only went to use the computer and have the one obligatory drink required for use. We did, however, stay quite a bit longer because we ended up meeting and talking to some American service men stationed in Darmstadt of all places. We talked to these guys for hours ...