The Stevenson Ohana

We have been talking about a "Europe trip" since before we were married. . .  and finally decided to pull the trigger and do it! We planned for MONTHS and prepared. We didn't eat out for a couple months (to save more monies) and watched movies to prepare for this trip. We also convinced some awesome friends to take Luke for the couple weeks while we were gone! We were just a little excited.

So, it was SHOCKING and borderline tragic when I received the text while still Japan about to check-in for flight from our host asking: "Where are you?" . . . After all that planning, we had somehow miscalculated the arrival date with the time difference. We mostly blame Expedia for not saying "+1 day" like it did on return flight... ANYWAYS. It was a rough start to the trip. We missed going to the Paris temple and Versailles and lost out. Once we finally touched down in Paris we had to rush to try to make our train to Bayeux so we didn't miss our Normandy tour too. We took an expensive taxi to the train station from Paris airport, but the traffic was terrible and baggage claim took forever we missed our pre-paid train by less than 10 minutes. So sad. We booked the next train and after a couple hours and another taxi we finally met up with our tour!

THANK GOODNESS, the TOUR WAS SO AWESOME! We quickly forgot the chaos of the morning and fell in love with the France countryside and listened as the guide told stories and took us around. We had watched Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers HBO series before coming which both added so much to the experience and walking the grounds of these places.

Omaha Beach- one of the invasion landings that will be remembered forever as "Bloody Omaha"

At this point of tour, I learned about the "Bedford Boys." It was a group of thirty-five men from small southern town in Bedford, Virgina. They were all in the same company and on D-Day nineteen of them were killed that day and another four later on. Really impacting the small city. This statue was built in honor of the boys, who like so many others in our nation, lost their sons and brothers on that one single day. (They stopped putting people from the same town in the same company because of this).

Pointe du Hoc

We stayed in the cutest town in France. Our Airbnb was right across from this grand cathedral that we explored it all alone just the two of us. So NEAT. We were both blown away with everything and had the best pizza that evening. One thing I wish I took a photo of was our airbnb. It was this bed and breakfast place and was out of a storybook, our door used this old skeleton key and was one of our favorite places we stayed during our trip.

 

This picture isn't very good, taken from the train. We passed so much cool countryside and literally hundreds of these beautiful yellow canola flower fields.