Plans

Today we are planning our trip to the D-day beaches and Bayeaux.

We're using Rick Steve's guide as well as an old Michelin guide. Rick gives lots of practical information and tips, such as where to find a grocery store, and Michelin gives great detail going back to prehistory for geologic details about a place. They make a good combination.

I've booked our hotel online. So much easier than the telephone, though I was able to call our Paris hotel and have a successful conversation.

Communicating with a bit of French when the other person knows about the same amount of English works pretty well, though.

We've heard that the French refuse to speak English. We don't find that's true. I think they are as reticent about using clumsy English as we are about using clumsy French. When you try, using what you know, most people open up and speak a few words of English proudly.

For detailed and precise communications, such as the conversation I'm about to have with Marie-Louise next door, the Google translator works well. I write out what I want to say in English and the translator gives me the French, which I then transcribe to a note for her. Doing this makes certain that my verbs are conjugated correctly and in the right tense. You can get in a lot of trouble with verbs.

As I walk up the drive next door I hear Marie-Louise laughing and talking with someone. It's her family who are in the car about to leave. She greets me and her grandson, whose name I believe is Allen, speaks very politely to me in English. He's a nice-looking blond boy with a shy expression.

She introduces me to the family. all of whom seem to speak English. Allen looks to be somewhere between 10 and 12 and his sister perhaps a year or two older. The son and daughter are a handsome couple.

Marie-Louise will feed our cats on Sunday night and Monday morning.

Bernie has maps and guidebooks all over the bed and he's busy making notes. I read the guidebooks. We want to see the D-Day beaches of course, and the Bayeaux tapestry, but we'd like to see Honfleurs, too, a port city for 1000 years. Champlain sailed from Honfleurs to discover the St. Lawrence River.

There's a movie on about Hitler's bunker. It keeps us up later than we should be, with a hundred commercials toward the end, as usual. But now we're even more eager to see the place where Hitler's evil began to unravel.