London - Normandy - Paris - 2017
First class on a 747!!! Well worth all the Skymiles we cashed in! Seat 1A in the very nose of the aircraft (20 feet in front of the pilots) and a very comfy bed! Below, the sunrise from 40,000 feet out the front window. (Closing in on the sun at a combined speed of about 1500 mph...the whole sunrise only took 45 seconds.)
Hampton Court where Henry VIII and his wives lived.
A cool building in London called "The Shard", Tower Bridge, and The Tower of London.
Seriously? This passes for a root beer float? The Eurostar from London to Paris. Cathedral de Bayeux
This is a church in Sainte-Mère-Église where some of the paratroopers landed. On the night of the invasion, one of paratroopers landed on the church and his chute caught on one of the spires. If you look closely, you can see a paratrooper hanging from a spire in tribute.
Bomb craters and the cliff at Point Du Hoc.
Point Du Hoc monument, German cemetery, monument to liberating paratroopers, American cemetery below.
The Normandy beaches with the tide in (and out) and a tank wall engineers had to blast through to get equipment off the beaches.
The sequence of pictures at right and below will give you some sense of how far the Allied troops had to go when the invasion started at low tide. The people are in the middle of each frame. Each successive picture reduces the zoom until the image is what you would see with the naked eye; you can barely see the people. The distance is around a quarter of a mile. Imagine moving among obstacles while being shot at to advance up the beach. (When these pictures were taken the tide was not completely out.)
A couple of "dab" moves for my students! (See video at the end of webpage.)
A view of Mont Saint Michel, a German bunker, and the view from our hotel room.
They go BIG at the Louvre!
The Cathedral of Notre Dame.
The Eiffel Tower from Trocadero Square and some pictures from Versailles including the Hall of Mirrors, the desk where the treaty was signed, and a pretty cool light fixture made of crystal.
Sacred Heart Basilica and the "Phantom's Box" at the Paris Opera House.
Business class and the cockpit of an A380...pretty cool!!!
Paris Opera House. And...apparently the guy who invented potato chips is so famous there is a bust of him in the Paris Opera House! ;) (And Laraine believed me what I told her about this amazing fact!!!)
We almost never buy souvenirs, but there was a guy in the Eiffel Tower who had a shop where they take a 3-D scan and etch it in a glass block. I took a video of the machine working. The whole process was fascinating!
Watching a show about puppies...pure joy! What a flight! Sparkling Eiffel Tower!
Amazing street performer in Paris near the Sacred Heart Basilica. Filming and watching him in person was quite the sight. Please note, as he is hanging from the light post by one arm, the soccer ball is spinning on the end of a pen...incredible!
The French do a great job warning about the dangers of smoking. Instead of a plainly worded warning, each package has a visual of what cigarettes can do.
There are these funny looking balls in trees all over in France. Turns out...it's mistletoe! Mistletoe is an evergreen, parasitic shrub that grows on other trees.
