One Year Old

Happy Paper Anniversary to myself and Claire today! That's correct, Claire and I were betrothed to one another in La Baule exactly one year ago.

In order to celebrate, we spent the weekend at a chambre d'hote (bed and breakfast) in the Normandy region of France. We were quite the tourists this weekend...efficiently hitting most of the important sites. The weekend began with a fairly ominous start...it took us several hours to make it out of the horrendous Paris traffic on Friday after work in our rental car, and when we arrived at our destination, the very tiny village of Saint Gabriel-Brecy, it was well past dark and we had trouble finding the chambre d'hote we had previously arranged. In fact, at one point we even mistook some random person's house as our chambre d'hote, and went so far as to walk through their front door at midnight. Fortunately, the residents were quite friendly and pointed us in the right direction. Our actual destination, which we did finally discover a little past midnight, is actually a small chateau, and is pictured below:

Saturday was our "World War II History Day." We drove to Arromanches, along the Normandy Coast, which was the site of an incredible artificial harbor constructed by the Brits during the War. As the Germans controlled all the major port cities even after D-Day (which, by the way, is called "Jour-J" by the French), the Allies were forced to tow enormous pieces of concrete and floating metal out into the sea and construct an artificial port they could use to create a shelter for ships to unload supplies and soldiers. Although only a few pieces of the artificial harbor remain visible in the sea today, a bunch of the pieces have washed up on shore, where they have been kept for historic purposes. Very interesting.

I have more pictures and stories to tell, but I'll include them on later posts during the week...