Major Mom 
19 July 22: More photos from our day at the Caen Memorial Museum and Longue-sur-Mer. The heat prevented doing anything more.
Fortunately a line of thundershowers came thru the area and cooled things down on the coastline a bit for the visit to the German gun emplacement at Longue-sur-Mer. And things will be much cooler tomorrow.
19 July 22: We started our day at the Caen Memorial Museum. We are (a) grateful for the air conditioning, (b) in awe of the gorgeous exhibits, and (c) fascinated by the telling of the stories with a French point of view.
We will see if we do anything else after this. It’s dangerously hot for any of the outdoor activities we were planning today.
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.
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.
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!
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. … Read more
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 … Read more
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.
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.
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.