France 2014: Intro

France Road Trip

During the summer of 2014 Emile and daughter Suzannah took off for a week in France with Emilie’s mother and sister.  They visited Paris and Versailles.  After their week, I joined them in Paris to begin a week-long France road trip.  The plan was to spend a couple of days in Paris, then rent a car from De Gaulle airport and drive to the Normandy coast and back to Paris.  We would make stops within the Loire Valley to visit some vineyards.

We figured it would be good to introduce our 17-year-old daughter to good wine before she began discovering her own bad wine in college. Our objective for the whole trip was to hopefully influence Suzannah to not want to drink anything but quality wine and so minimize her intake of cheap alcohol in college.  We’ll just leave it to the experienced parents out there to say whether we were ultimately successful with that.

But, we figured we would sprinkle some amazing travel experiences around this underlying objective.  So, we made stops along the loop trip in Honfleur, Bayeux, Mont Saint-Michel, Saumur, Chartres, and some other small towns.  Of course, a true objective of the trip was to visit the Normandy beaches and pay homage to the heroes of D-Day on what was the 70th anniversary of the landing.

We ended up stopping at all of the landing beaches as well as the American cemetery.  To see actual WWII hardware still in the water and bunkers still in the beach cliffs was fascinating and quite moving.  We learned some interesting things as well, like the fact that Teddy Roosevelt’s son was the only general to land with the troops.  He survived the landing but died not long after, in France, of a heart attack.

We planned the trip ourselves.  Hotels.com was the primary tool used to find and book all lodging.

Our journal of the trip follows.  As most of the items on this blog site, the prose is diary-like, not intended really for telling a story to others. Please comment and share pics, experiences, and recommendations.

Paris for a Couple of Days

Normandy Coast, Honfleur, Bayeux, Mont Saint-Michel

Loire Valley

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