Omaha Beach

yesterday we made it to omaha beach. this is the one where the majority of americans died on dday, ie saving private ryan, that should give you a visual. although the actual beach looks nothing like that now. all of the german defences have been removed. there is the american cemetary on top of the hill where all of the americans who were killed while fighting in normandy(the particular region of france) are buried. there are of course several memorials. The whole thing was very surreal and left us kind of speechless. on the trip i had read a book full of accounts of men who were there that day and ... well im not sure what else there is to say. its things like this and auschwitz that remind us how much bigger life is than our day to day worries.

Today we are doing the eiffel tower and notre dame etc and then in the rest of the days we will be in brussels, amsterdam and finally dublin. take care

Bon Jour!
we are right now in paris. barcelona was very interesting. when we got there 24hrs of train later, they were out of hostels...we had cancelled our reservations a day before because we thought we werent gonna get there, but then we decided cause we had heard a lot about it...anyways we ended up having to get two rooms at a hotel for 50 bucks a person...ouch but better than on the street. we got some good spanish food, tapas, basically potatoes, but they were good, plus some other food. then we had about 24 hrs to blitzkrieg the city, like with ,any other cities before getting on our last night train to paris. barcelona was nice but like many places, i feel we didnt spend enough time to fully appreciate it.

so now we are in paris, back on schedule, and it is raining very hard. hopefully the weather will get better. tomorrow we are hopefully going to the dday beaches. this euro,keyboqrd is annoying me noz so im done typing;

goodbye;

quick update

just a quick update to let you all know that we are still alive and our current plans.

we blitzkrieged rome, doing just about everything i could think of in not quite two days. it was very good to be back after two years, so many great memories. We can tell you all about it later but here are some highlights; in addition to all of the normal tourist sights we had some great italian food, wine and gelato, I saw a friend from when i studied there(Flavio), and we found an irish pub where we watched the brewers one night.

Then we went to florence and stayed at camping michelangelo...thats another post in itself.

Yesterday we hiked cinque terre...again like the castle google it and look at the pictures...amazing!

Now we have to change our plans a bit. we found out that what we originally wanted to do is not quite feasable so we have to cut nice out in order to salvage barcelona. so today and tomorrow we will be on trains from about noon till 2pm...5 different trains in all and then spend the better part of 2 days in barcelona before heading to paris. we will try to blog more soon.

Our hearts and prayers are with the victims of the bridge collapse and their families!
Ciao!