Bella, Gabe and Josiah

It was a pretty quiet day. We drove from Coutances to Chanverrie, which meant leaving Normandy. That was actually pretty sad, as we fell in love with Normandy. The boys also didn’t want to leave the chickens. But our place in Chanverrie may not have had animals, but it had a quiet peaceful river in the backyard.  

When we started passing this trip, I knew that I wanted to go back to Mont Saint-Michel. I loved it when I was here 13 years ago and I wanted to go back and show the boys.  First, however, we had to get breakfast and that involved walking into Coutances where we found a big church. This was our Airbnb. A cottage in a garden… …guarded by chickens. Two of them were named The Fluffy Twins by Josy. Then we drove to Mont Saint-Michel. On the walk in, Pat informed me that this place was on his main bucket list. I’d had no idea. I thought we’d just planted this part of the trip for me, not for him… As a side note, the other two were Uluru, which we did last year, and Petra. Um, I’m pretty sure we are not going to get an three checked off this year… There aren’t many words to describe this place. It’s amazing! At the top, inside the Abbey, we found the horse from the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics. I did not expect that. Inside the Abbey was a replica of the moon. That’s a giant fire pla...

We decided to get out of Paris and see a few other things, so we picked up a rental car and started driving. Unfortunately we picked up the car in the center of Paris and driving in Paris is chaos, so our blood pressures may be slightly higher now… But we made it to Omaha Beach in Normandy. The first stop was lunch where we got gallettes. Josy took one look at it and said “This is not what I expected…” but then happily ate the whole thing. Welcome to ordering food in a foreign country, kid… Then we went to the D-Day Museum. Afterwards, we walked down to the beach. I was complaining at the boys for playing, as it felt like this place deserved more honor than that. Then I rejected that that’s what all those boys died for. So that prior kids could play in peace, safety and freedom. Then we went to Pont du Hoc. There was lot more we could have seen, but we ran out of time, so we drove to Coutances to our airbnb, which aired to be an adorable cottage with a private garden and the most incre...