France - Normandy

We left Paris this morning having picked up our rental car at the Gare du Nord train station. The pickup process wasn't too bad and it should have been easy to get on the freeway, but our Ms Garmin was having trouble locating a satellite. We ended up getting on the freeway but heading the wrong direction so there was a lot of confusing backtracking and driving down residential streets that was required. At any rate, we made it out of Paris and on our way to Bayeux where we will stay for the next three nights. We made a slight detour to a sweet little village called Beuvron-on-Auge for lunch and made it to Bayeux in the late afternoon. While we were driving along the back country roads to Beuvron, we stopped to take pictures of an old church and met a group of folks from Seattle who were on a backroad bicycle tour of France. Oh! And I finally got my macaroon.

Once we checked into our hotel, we went to see the Bayeux Tapestry. This is a 70 meter long (horizontally) tapestry from the 11th century depicting the Norman conquest of England. An amazing thing to see, very well preserved and an excellent audio guide came with the admission price.  Mike and I both thought it was really interesting and we're glad we managed to see it. Our days in Bayeux will be pretty full as we're doing an all-day D-Day tour on Tuesday and we're also going to Mont St Michel tomorrow. We're really looking forward to both of those days and the D-Day tour was our primary reason for coming to France this year. Once I knew we would be coming to France I knew I absolutely had to see the Mont. I've been wanting to go there for quite some time.