Bayeux, Cherbourg, Ireland, Chicago, Michigan...Chicago?

July 21 to Present Day
We spent a day in Bayeux, France which isn’t on the shore where D-day happened, but slightly inland. They were one of the first cities liberated from the Germans by the Allies. They still fly the flags of all the different countries the helped liberate France from the Nazis. We walked through the cemetery and the ever present memorials. It appeared that the only thing the city had going for them was tourism due to the historical events of the city’s past. But, it was well kept and quite the enjoyable little town. After that we took a ferry from France to Ireland. It was an 18 hour overnight trip. The choppy waters made TJ and me a little off balance the whole next day trying to readjust to solid ground. We had to have looked like drunkards walking down the sidewalk. Ireland was particularly relaxing because we were finally among English language speakers again, strong accents, but at least it was English never the less. Ireland is very much like all the stereotypes: strong Irish accents; lots of red haired, fair skinned people; lots of drizzling rain that would stop and start a lot. We explored 2 castles while in Ireland. And our last night in Europe, TJ and I splurged on a nice 4 course Chinese restaurant, which was a nice time to sit, relax, and reflect on our trip to Europe.

Our 7 hour flight left Ireland at 2:20 PM July 23rd and landed at 4:30 in Chicago. There is nothing like flying thru 5 time zones to screw up your sleeping schedule. My dad and Beppe (my grandma) picked us at the airport and drove us to Michigan. It was so sweet, because I wasn’t looking forward to another 4 hour train ride to get us home. Thanks Dad and Beppe!! We have been hanging out with family this weekend. Later today (Sunday) we are going to take off to Chicago again, now that we have picked up our car with some of our belongings. Due to some desperate circumstances that my previous and now current company is going through, I’m going to be working in Chicago this week, and TJ is going to be chilling out near Joliet. So, feel free to call him if you want to hang out! We are down to one cell phone because my phone died in Europe. If you want to call us, use TJ’s cell phone number.

After this week, the plan is to spend another weekend in Michigan and then take off to Texas on Sunday. At this point, our plan has changed more than Dennis Rodman’s hair color during the Bulls era, so we really aren’t positive if this is “the plan” (okay, to clarify TJ added that last sentence...Heidi doesn't really know who Dennis Rodman is or the apparent personality crisis that he was going through during the mid 90's). We will write more later on. Thanks for all the prayers and advice while we were in Europe!

7/20-22

Barcelona to Paris to Bayeux to Cherbourg - France

Well, we’re three days shy of being gone for a month. We’ve left Barcelona and headed north east. We took a 3 hour train to Cerbere, which is on the French/Spain border. It was a quaint resort town. Heidi and I ate pizza…which for the record tastes nothing like American pizza. We’re looking forward to eating some good old fashioned Pizza Hut style pizza. Regardless, we then jumped on a night train from Barcelona to Paris, which took all of about 12 hours. We got the last seat available on the train and one bed because there were no seats left. Although we were separated, after camping out for basically the last 2 weeks straight, we enjoyed sleeping on the train…especially the one who got the bed :). After arriving in Paris at 8:30 in the morning, we received a free 4 day pass to all the museums in Paris (from someone leaving Paris)…that was good for one last day. Heidi and I took advantage of it and went to the Louvre. We surprisingly, really enjoyed it, especially the free baggage storage. I guess they don’t want crazy backpackers knocking over priceless artifacts. After our incredibly lengthy hike from the train station to the Louvre with our backpacks, we decided that we would save about $5 and continue to walk around Paris. We have no idea how far we walked, but we managed to take some great pictures of us at the Eiffel Tower. We enjoyed Paris, and had no run-ins with the “Rude French”.
P.S. we got rid of the free pass to some Canadians.
Also, due to our lack of money and an urging to get back to the states (due to a number of things…wanting a real Diet Coke, Johnnies beef, a mattress, Heidi’s work calling and e-mailing her showing a desire for her to help them out, wanting an idea of where we’re moving to other than “Dallas”, and numerous other factors) we decided to see what our airline could do about getting us back to the states a week early. After a lot of busy work, a pricey phone bill, and a great kink in the plan leaving us in Ireland for 2 days, we’re on our way to the area where D-day/The Battle of Normandy took place and then taking a ferry to Ireland. Yay boat trips!
We’ll write more soon!

July 12-19

It’s been quite a while since we last blogged, it's been difficult to find internet access.
Well, after Rome we decided to check out the leaning tower of Pisa. After reading up on Pisa, everything we heard was that Pisa was the type of town that you can see in just an afternoon. So, we got on the train in the morning and got to Pisa by noon. We took a bus out to Pisa…although we could easily have walked to the tower (we did end up walking back). We’ve learned that the tourism offices always tell you to take public transportation…although it’s quicker to walk to most places than wait for the busses to show up. Oh, and while I’m on that subject. Busses stink. There’s never a good map for them on the bus, and they never have enough information for tourists like us to know where they’re taking you. You have to basically guess as to where you want to be dropped off.
So all the guides we read and watched were correct. Pisa was definitely taken care off in an afternoon. Actually, Heidi and I were done by about 3. 3 hours in Pisa was sufficient (that included walking back from the tower and eating lunch in a sit down restaurant). We got back to the train station and were informed that Italian trains were out of service due to a RAILROAD STRIKE! We got a little nervous since there really wasn’t much else to do in Pisa. We managed to find a Texan stationed in Italy on vacation with his mom. He was also trying to get out of Pisa. They had been jumping from track to track trying to get on a train that was actually moving. Long story short, we jumped on a train to Genova, which is halfway between Pisa, Italy and Nice, France. We thought that would be a good location since Nice was halfway between Rome and Barcelona, our next big city to hit.
Sadly, we were mistaken. Genova wasn’t a good city. Actually, there was nothing in Genova. No camping, no trains out, no cheap hotels. Instead we stayed at the train station overnight until 6:15, when the next train to Nice would head out. Let me tell you, staying in a train station over night was not the highlight of the trip. Well, we got to Nice, and that wasn’t much better. Fortunately they had camping, unfortunately we had to walk about 3 miles up hill to get to it. After a long night of not sleeping in a train station walking 3 miles up hill wasn’t all that great. Also, the only way we’d make it to Barcelona was by taking a train at 6 am. That would mean we would have to get up at 4:30 to make the 3 mile journey (downhill this time) to get to the train station. For the record, we walked about 12 miles that day…on little sleep. We had to go into town once to purchase food, plus the walk back to the train station and obviously we needed to go to the beach. They had stone beaches, not nearly as much fun as Lake Michigan’s sand beaches.
After all that walking I managed to get blisters all over my feet. They started off small and I ignored them, which doesn’t do well for blisters. One managed to go between my toes and was bigger than a silver dollar. I had to hobble around for a while…and then it exploded…just kidding, but it was painful. I’d post a picture but I don’t want to gross you out any more than I already have.
Everything has been great since we made it to Barcelona. We’ve decided we wanted to relax and enjoy our vacation…and actually have a vacation. We’re camping about 150 feet from the beach (a nice sandy beach). We’ve been able to rest everything accept our newly acquired sunburns. We haven’t decided our next step, but we’ve been enjoying Barcelona so much that we probably won’t leave for a while. Sorry Tolee, that probably means that we won’t be making it to Morocco, as fun as that sounds like it would be.

Rome – July 9-11

Heidi and I have been camping at a campsite on the outskirts of Rome for the last three days. For some reason, maybe it’s because of the movies or my high school used old text books, but the place isn’t as old as I figured it would be. It’s strange because you’ve got ruins dated to 4 B.C. and then you’ve got brand new office buildings right next to it. I guess you need new buildings, or all of Rome would be considered ruins. Yesterday we went on a “hop on – hop off” bus tour. We were able to see The Coliseum, some ancient ruins, old churches and other things on our 11 stop tour. We went inside the Sistine Chapel and saw Michelangelo and Raphael’s work. It was quite impressive, but the heat and long lines made viewing the chapel a bit anticlimactic after everything was said and done.
My personal favorite happened today. We went to the San Callisto Catacombs. Because of persecution and Roman rules, Christian martyrs and others were buried in underground tombs on the outskirts of the city. They would worship God through music, painting, communion and the teaching of God’s Word in these catacombs. It was thrilling to be in the very spot of some of the great men and women of the faith. Unfortunately because of vandals and age the tombs have been emptied and empty holes are the only thing left.

Heidi and I also saw some random things that we thought were quite interesting. First, when we were in the Vatican Museum (where you have to go to get to the Sistine chapel). It was run by the Roman Catholic Church. The amount of Greek Mythology and Iconography that was in the Vatican was sickening. Things that God told the Israelites to destroy and things that were detestable to God were clearly on display throughout the Vatican. Also, while Heidi at the Sistine Chapel we saw signs saying that it was closing early, which we found out later was because the Obama’s were going to be visiting it later that day…ha ha, we saw it first! We even saw the presidential motorcade pull out of the Vatican. Unfortunately they blocked the road off to everybody until all 25 or so vehicles made it out, causing us to miss our bus.

We decided to camp one more night in Rome, so we will be heading out of Rome on our way to Spain tomorrow morning. I don’t know when the next time we will be able to post, so until next time!
(This is now Heidi) So our camping village had a band last night, who played all oldies, which all but a few were in English. They played some songs from the movie “Grease” which I know and really enjoy. Part way thru TJ and I realized that the lead singer didn’t speak any English. So he did pretty good mimicking the songs, but quite a few times you could tell he was just making some sort of sound like that was similar to the song but his sentences didn’t make sense at all! It was pretty great.

Venice and Florence

July 9, 2009
Venice was wonderful. We stayed at a guy’s house. He had turned half of it into rented out rooms. It was quaint and cute. And he threw in a free Italian pizza because he owned a restaurant too. There were canals everywhere which made things tricky because the canals curve all over the place, and there wasn’t any road signs that I could understand so TJ and I got lost quite a bit. One night we were lost and we asked some guy on the street where the train station was because we could find our way from there. He explained and a he went on ahead and a little while later more people stopped him and asked him the same thing. This time he took them, and us, part way then explained it again. People getting lost in Venice is a common occurrence, might as well consider it part of the experience and enjoy it. There are no cars allowed on the island of Venice so the boats bring the supplies to the little shops. It was fun to see them tossing things out of boats for the shop keepers to catch.
After Venice we went to Florence where we camped out. The campsite had showers and gave us a map of the city. There are some great old buildings. We didn’t see the actual David sculpture, but there were replicas of him in 2 other places in which we did see. Florence has the 3rd oldest bridge (according to our pamphlet) and one of the only bridges with store buildings on it. Something we noticed about Italy so far is there seems to be an overwhelming amount of police everywhere. Also, they sure love their gelato (their version of ice cream). They have a shop at every street corner. I also have never seen some many naked statues. I think 50% of all the sculptures have absolutely no clothes on, and there is a lot of statues. Silliness! We are now on our way to Roma. We are going to try to camp there also because it worked out so well in Florence.

Oops forgot the pictures!

Oh, and there is a correction to the spelling of Shuart's name. Although it's pronounced Shuart they spell it, Sjoerd. Sorry Sjoerd!

Berlin, Munich, and the beautiful Italy

July 6, 2009
Berlin was interesting. We only spent a couple hours there. All I really wanted to see was the Berlin wall. I heard they have really great museums there, but the whole “everything is in German” thing kind of hinders us. I was actually surprised by how much of the wall was still there, and there was a well put together honest “documentation center” which we enjoyed. After that, TJ got a bratwurst because we are after all in Germany . It began to rain, it was the first day we were outside in the rain. To avoid the rain we then went to Munchen, or as we call it in America, Munich. We took a free walking tour which gave us some history of the city. Munich was the starting place of the Nazi party, but they are trying to “move past” that, and they have chosen to not do memorials or pretty much anything to remember what happened there during World War II. Many people in Germany, and TJ and I, think that is very cowardly way to handle the horrible tragedy of the Holocaust. It seems that people will forget what happened more than move past, but other than that, we liked the city. TJ and I climbed 14 stories of a church tower and had a grand view of the entire city which I enjoyed when I ignored all the butterflies in my stomach. We were outside the tower on a tiny ledge when the bells rang to inform us that it was 3 o’clock. It was pretty freaky, especially since the ledge, in my opinion, had very thin guard rails.
We stopped off in Innsbruck, Austria for the night. It was quite beautiful. I believe we are traveling through the Alps. The city itself looks very old, but very well kept. Heidi and I actually camped in the Alps…if that’s what they were. Paul’s tent that we are borrowing worked great. It’s about time we got to use it, since I’ve been carrying it in my backpack the whole trip. We didn’t have a rain fly on because it would have been too difficult to do since it was already dark when we started putting it up. It rained, but we were sheltered very nicely by trees and didn’t get wet at all! I woke up at 5am, hearing the rain, and started singing (in my head) a song that I learned during my college years that has the lyrics, “you are a shelter Lord, a sanctuary from the storm”. God protects us so well from so many things, and continues to do so! It’s still raining quite hard, but we are on our way to Italy. The mountains are amazing, God is so great.

So, Heidi and I are in Venice right now! It's awesome. We got a great deal on some old restaurant owners apartment. We're right on a canal! It's beautiful. Well, until next time.