18 July 22: An exhausting, emotional, and educational day. We visited 8 sites throughout the Utah and Omaha Beach areas, painting a story of the American forces’ role in Operation Overlord. Once we got >1 km from the coastline — such as in La Cambe and Carentan — the heat became somewhat debilitating. Because of this we decided to forgo the Maisy Battery in Grandcamp Maisy.
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17 July 22: We made it to Port-en-Bessin-Huppain, a town on the French northern coast, in the early afternoon. This town is the junction between Omaha and Gold Beaches (for you history buffs). But it’s also a thriving seaside town with lots of touristy activities for visitors from throughout Europe. We have an AirBnB right on the shoreline overlooking the port.
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17 July 2022: We made it to France!! We got the rental car and are on our way to the Normandy coast!! I’m only on Wifi for now…we are at a rest stop now just outside Paris after a chaotic trip out of the city. Tim’s doing a great job navigating…and Jacob’s 5+ years of French is being put to good use!
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16 July 22: We flew from Denver to Newark, then Newark to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.
I had been watching the FlightAware app for weeks tracking delays and cancellations. We did well — we had a 30 minute delay between Denver and Newark, and then another 30-45 minute delay between Newark and Paris.
This is the first of our Daily Selfies from the trip.
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? We’ve endured an entire pandemic, Dave’s and my military retirements, and our sons finishing high school and moving away to college….all since the last blog post in 2018, right? I think most of our readers know me on some sort of social media, and of course you can find me there.
I’m back mainly because our family just returned from a 16-day European vacation and I want to use this space to document our travels, much like what I did for our Hawaii trip in March 2018.
I was able to use Facebook to share our daily travelogues and my plan is to bring them over here to this blog, which, IMHO, is a more enduring, more easily-searchable capability.
Stay tuned for lots of photos…including our “Daily Selfie”! Enjoy!
Breckenridge selfie, with her impatient family. I didn’t get any better mountain photos than this.
Yep – first non-Instagram post in a very long time. I’m sad to announce that I had to remove about 80% of my Instagram posts today due to a server upgrade that destroyed the links to the IG posts. That’s okay. You can see the original Instagram posts here. Everything since about August is still in place.
We Vollmers have been living in Colorado Springs for FIVE years and had never skied at Breckenridge…until yesterday. More »
You don’t see much of me in these photos, but here’s one!
Note: I wasn’t sure if I’d have anything to write. We had a 7pm redeye flight home (in other words, we flew overnight from Honolulu to Denver; with the time change we arrived at sunrise). We ended up having quite an adventure up the eastern coast of Oahu, discovering the Polynesian Cultural Center:
We hit the pool one last time before we had to check out of the hotel room by 11am. We enjoyed lunch at L&L Hawaiian, then on a whim we decided to drive up to Laie, the town in the northeast with the Polynesian Cultural Center. The drive there from Honolulu is very pretty, with several stretches that literally hug the ocean. More »
Driving towards Haleiwa, Hawaii, on the North Shore.
On Thursday we picked up a rental car at about 7:30am and headed straight over to the USS Arizona memorial to see about getting tickets for the same day. We got ourselves tickets for the last boat ride at 3pm, and took a drive around the island in the intervening time.
A panoramic shot of Kaneohe Bay, on the east coast of Oahu. Can you see the P-3?
Today’s adventure was a trip over to Kaneohe Bay on the east side of the island, a location well-known for snorkeling. We were not disappointed. More »
For a Colorado family, hiking up Diamond Head was cake! I just wish it wasn’t so crowded.
Today was an active day. We awakened nice and early to take an Uber over to the Diamond Head State Park trailhead, arriving at around 8am. We easily took the trail up and back and enjoyed the views immensely, but didn’t enjoy the crowds or the incredible humidity: we were pretty soaked in sweat by the time we got back to the base area about an hour later.
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