Photos Photos Everywhere

So in just over a week I took 871 photos. Yeah, I'm a little crazy.

Time flies... sometimes slowly

It is hard to believe that my first week away is over. Although on the other hand sometimes it feels that I have been gone for a month! In my week on my own I travelled all over Normandy and Brittany. Put about 2000km on the car I think. Saw a few war memorials and some of the D-Day beaches. Saw a bunch of great castles. Had some cool hotels right in the heart of downtown overlooking small pedestrian-only cobblestone streets. It has been cool.

Now I am back in the city of Tours. This afternoon I return the car and tomorrow the week-long cycling tour starts. Let the pain begin!

I remember when Jeff and I went hiking in New Zealand up this crazy mountain (turned out to be next to Mt Doom from the Lord of the Rings movies...cool) and it just about killed us. The quote of the week was "I don't care how much time you put in at the gym in the mornings... nothing quite prepares you for climbing up a mountain.". Tomorrow we see if all those RPM classes have prepared me for the cycling trip...

Touch typing

You wouldn't believe how long it is taking me to type these short messages. Since I work on computers all day, I'm a relatively fast typer and I don't look at the keyboard. All that changes when they move the keys around on you! haha

I figured out a way to beat the system though as far as typing certain characters. For the life of me I couldn't figure out how to type an @ symbol. But copy/paste still work so I just found that character on a page and copied it. Take that you crazy keyboard!

Facebook in France

Everywhere I see someone on the computer here, they are using Facebook. There was an elderly British guy in a put the other day complaining that the computer didn't work and when it finally was ok, he was checking his Facebook page.

Myself, on the other hand, can't figure out this bloody keyboard so I won't be FB'ing from here. In fact, anything which requires the 'at' symbol is out of my scope. The other day it took me 10min to figure out how to do it and that was with help from another guy. And he didn't speak English so you can imagine how that conversation went...

French Lesson 2

I like apple juice with breakfast rather than orange juice (which seems to be standard). So the other day I asked for "jus au pomme". The guy looked at me like I had 3 heads and I repeated myself and he said something in French which I didn't understand so I stuck with orange juice.

I went away from the meal thinking that I had mistakenly asked for potatoe juice or something silly like that. But it turns out (based on other menus, etc) that here apple juice is really alcoholic apple cider. So yeah, I guess that isn't something that I should be asking for in the morning.

French Lesson 1

pour voler - to rob/steal
pour conduire - to drive

Try not to get them confused when you are trying to describe what you do to your car.

Vitré

That is the name of the town I stayed in last night. Got only one paragraph in the Rough Guide but was a neat medival town with, of course, a castle. Got a good 24 hour parking spot close to the tourist office and walking distance to the hotel so you can't beat that.

While at dinner I was trying to decide whether to start heading back to Tours (where the bike tour starts) or whether to go back up to the North Coast of Britanny to check out some of the cool rock formations. Well, I got up early and grabbed so,e quick breakfast at the bakery across the street from the hotel (oh yeah, that's cool) and hit the highway for the North. Currently I am at the tourist office in a small town called Plougrescant.

I think tonight I will stay near Vennes and then start making my way to Tours for Friday night. But we'll see... plans might change depending on what interesting things I run across along the way!