Moran Family Fun

Our final full day in France was spent visiting the D-Day landing beaches of Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach. These two locations were kind of the whole reason Jared wanted to go to France for spring break. He'd been here before, in 2002 or 2003 for the Transatlantic Council's Normandy Camporee and pretty much loved every minute of his time at these historic locations. Jared has wanted to go back with our family ever since and it only took almost twenty years to finally make it happen.  We started out kind of late in the day, it was a vacation after all, and arrived at Pointe du Hoc just after lunchtime. Pointe du Hoc is a cliff eight miles from Omaha Beach and was the location of German artillery batteries that could have fired on American troops landing on Utah and Omaha beaches. Army Rangers scaled the 100-foot cliffs with the mission to disable the German positions and they were successful but at a great cost. Only 90 of the 225 Rangers who started the climb up the clif...

One place I wanted to visit while we were in France was Mont-Saint-Michel. It's a UNESCO site and I love almost always love those. I remember going somewhere similar when I was a child and lived in England. But in my memory, we never went to France and it was during a trip to Cornwall, so maybe there are two places like this?  Anyway, Mont-Saint-Michel is an almost circular island that sits in a bay off the coast of Normandy. Well, sometimes it's an island and sometimes it's connected to the mainland; it all depends on the tides as it's only an island at high tide. The construction of the church that towers over the island was begun in the 8th century after the local bishop had a vision of the archangel St. Michael. People traveled there as a sort of pilgrimage and the small church soon expanded to become an abbey and monastery. Now it's one of the most well-known tourist attractions in France and the tiny island is filled with shops selling touristy trinkets, ...

We've celebrated Jared's birthday on the road for two years running. I think it would kind of stink, having to squeeze a little bit of birthday fun out of a day when you're on vacation. This year we visited Versailles, drove halfway across France, got our car stuck in the mud, and managed to fit in a celebration at the very end of a long day. But I guess he can also say that every year for his birthday we take a fun family trip? We drove halfway across the country on Jared's birthday because we were headed to our next stop, Houlgate, a small town on the English Channel. Houlgate was a good base for exploring the Normandy region and just a really charming little town. We learned from John Kennedy a long time ago that the best way to get to know a new area is to go for a run. So Jared and Abigail got up early our first morning there and went on a reconnaissance run to see what there was to see in and around Houlgate. They came back with all sorts of interesting i...