The Clement Bunch

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Pictures from North to South

Sleeping Beauty's Castle "Chateau d'Usse

Do you like Craig's hat?

Update from Rome

My favorite door at our B&B.

Mylene served tea, coffee, or hot chocolate in bowls. The kids LOVED drinking from them. They have all become tea lovers. I can see tea at breakfast at our house in the future.

Our awesome hosts with the kids. They bought their B&B about 12 years ago as an abandoned old house and totally rennovated it. It's beautiful.

We left Normandy on Tuesday am. Just in case you're not getting the ash cloud updates like we are, or you have your nose in the books, like Jacque, the situation is that almost ALL European air travel shut down. Plus the railroads in the south of France were on strike. We have met stranded people in lots of places and are so thankful to have had pre-puchased tain tickets, car rental and lodging up until now. We had to shuffle Tuesday to make sure we got to Rome by the 24th in order to catch our ship.
Anyway, we began Tuesday by saying goodbye to our wonderful "innkeepers" Christian and Mylene and the dogs. It has been my favorite place to stay and I hate having to leave early but it will have to be one of the "when I come back" times.:) We drove 3 hours through the most beautiful countryside. We arrived at the Chateau d'Usee around lunchtime. The Chateau is the same one the designers of Disneyland used as a model for Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland. We had so much fun climbing all the stairs and going in the alcoves and nooks. They have put scenes from Sleeping Beauty in many of the rooms and it was fun finding them all.
Then we drove about 8 more hours to Aix, France. We got there late and thought we had gone back in time when we got to our "hotel", if you can call it that. It looked like something straight out of Much Ado About Nothing. I read that it was built in the 15th/16th century. The only problem was that their "lift" (elevator) was broken. We were on the first floor, but to get to our room we had to go up stairs to get to reception, down a long flight of stairs to the basement level, back up another flight and then up a spiral stone staircase to get to our room! All with 7 suitcases and 6 backpacks! (notice I tell you how many quite often). But we made it and woke up to another beautiful day.
We drove another 2 hours to Nice. The scenery wasn't as pretty in the south as in the north. Many more cities instead of villages and rather poor looking. We spent an hour waiting on our driver at the Nice airport. (We weren't allowed to take our French car into Italy, otherwise we would have kept it and driven to Rome). We drove about and hour into Genova, Italy and bought our train tickets to Rome. Here we also had our first gelato- Italian ice cream. Mama mia is it good! We got on our train and had the coolest seats- a compartment with 6 big seat, 3 facing 3, where the door closed! It was great. Just like in Narnia or the I Love Lucy episode where they are on their way to Italy and Fred gets compartment seats instead of a sleeper so he can save $. We trained 3 hours to a town I don't know the name of. Then we waited 2 hours (in a park that had a monument to Christopher Columbus) and got on the second train. No compartment this time but we still had plenty of room and as time went on we and one other couple were the only ones in our car! The kids watched Craig's DVDs of Dick Van Dyke (they're hooked). Ellie finally fell asleep. We got to Rome around 11:30, got to hotel and crashed to sleep again.

Made it to Rome!

Whew! It's been a long two days. I'll explain fully tonite and do pictures but for now, on Tuesday we drove 11 hours to the south of France and spent the nite in Aix. Then we drove two more hours to Nice where we had to give up our mini-van and a driver picked us up at the Eurocar drop off site and drove us into Italy (it was here we found out our flight from Paris to Rome had definitely been cancelled- God is SO good to us!). We got a train to Rome which took us till 11:30 last nite. We slept in this am and feel refreshed and ready to go see Rome. Love you all!

Monday, April 19, 2010

More Normandy Pics

This is written on our bedroom door. Don't know what the beginning says buy Bonne nuit is good night. Bonne nuit everyone!

The back of our gypsy caravan.

One of the windows at our B&B.

Sully stood there watching the cows that live next door. Sully the farmer.

Ellie and DP had tea on our front porch. Love that they love tea!

A road through one of the villages. Lots of the roads have these high old walls lining them.

Loved this door.

Gorgeous Day!

my lunch!!!!

at the sidewalk cafe

R and S at the cafe

Ellie picked all the flowers (weeds) she could find and put them on the soldiers graves.

There are over 9,000 American Soldiers buried here.

Today was just beautiful. We ate breakfast in the sun room of our B&B with 3 other couples, one from Canada, one from Australia and one from France. I could have listened to the Aussies talk all day! The food was so good the kids forgot to talk! After Drew Preston played chase with the dog for awhile we left for Omaha Beach. It was a pretty drive. We stopped first at Gold beach where British troops came it. It was chilling to see how far they had to come up the beach, go through the dunes and then scale a wall just to get to the Germans who would be shooting at them the whole time. We next went to the American Memorial and Cemetery at Omaha Beach. They have a fantastic visitor center (2 years old) that explained everything in just the right amount of time. I loved this comment, "They (the fallen soldiers) gave their collective future so we could have ours". The whole Operation Overlord was amazing. One new thing I learned is that the Allies sucessfully pulled off amazing bluff by tricking the Axis into thinking the landings would happen at Calais. They even had "phantom armies", life-sized blow-up tanks and boats and they parachuted dummies behind the lines that had simulated noise to sound like an invasion was taking place. All this totally baffled the enemy!

The cemetery itself was sobering. All those crosses representing all those young lives. The kids were moved. We found several graves of Alabama soldiers.

Next we went to Bayeux to see the tapestry. First we ate lunch at a sidewalk cafe. We had dessert this time. Dessert is extra yummy in France. 3 had ice cream, 2 had banana splits and I had "ile flottant" (floating island). It is meringne floating in custard. OOO LA LA

The Bayeux Tapestry was so cool. It is a 230 ft. by about 3 ft. long linen embroidery telling the story of the fight for the English Crown between Harold II and William the Conquerer in 1066. It's a great story. Look it up. We all enjoyed it.

Good news on the Roman front. We are going to head south in the am to Tours where we will go by the Chateau d'Usse (Sleeping Beauty Castle) and then on towards Nice. The next am we will continue to Nice where a shuttle will pick us up and take us into Italy to catch a train to Rome. Seems the south of France is having a rail strike (nice time to do that) and that's why we can't get a train from Paris to Rome. Oh well, we'll have an adventure!

By the way, Sully and Tucker were quite put out that I said they were probably beating the stew out of each other last nite. They said they had lots of stew left and didn't get in any fights. :)

We also went into a wal-mart type store today and bought some more jackets!!!!!!!

Praying for Beverly!

Praying for Ivy and Co. !

Sunday, April 18, 2010

Why we are cold

The reason why we seem so cold is because I forgot to tell Sully and Tucker to pack a coat. I got one for Ellie and DP remembered his own. So I've been making S wear three shirts (he insists he's not cold) and Tucker and I are sharing the brown hoodie. Ellie threw up all over her sweater and we haven't been near a washing machine yet. Thank goodness Mylene here at La Mas Normand is going to let us do laundry today! It's warming up, too.