Browne Family D-Day Drop Zone

Much like Nick, it has been a busy few months for me as well, resulting in the blog being neglected.  Well good news family, I am back and ready to do some planning!

As the schedule stands for Paris right now, on Monday the 27th the Leonti's (Bob, Nan and Nick) are planning a day to explore some prehistoric sites.  You know cave paintings, old rocks, fossils, the works.  I thought this would be a good day for the Browne's (Jim, Sandy, Amber) to go explore Normandy and the WWII sites. This will be a nice opportunity for the parents to spend some quality time with their youngest and most favorite children, shush, this is a secret from Lisa and Travis.  And yes, you did read that correct, I did list all of our names associated with each family, as if we don't know each other. 

After doing much searching, I have found what I think is the best option for a tour of Normandy.  Not only does this tour cover all the major sites, but it is also organized around the train schedule to and from Paris as a day trip.  In addition to this, it only runs Monday-Friday, perfect being that we wanted to go on a Monday.  It is 85 euros a piece for the tour, which seems fairly average or a bit lower than the other tours I found, plus the train fare to and from Paris, which will run us about 30 euros a piece. Sounds pretty good right? Here are some more details.

The tour will take us to sectors where the American V Corps and VII Corps landings occurred at Omaha and Utah beaches. We will follow the steps of the famous 1st, 29th, and 4th American Infantry Divisions and the other units that linked up with them. We will also be taken to the misplaced drop zones of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Units that landed in the early morning hours of the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944.

We will visit some of these strong points, which were the better-defended German Positions along Omaha. We will stop at WN 62 and WN 65 in Fox Green and Easy Red sectors of the American landing, and WN 73 in Dog Green at Vierville. I am hoping that this military language makes some sense to you Dad, because they lost me at "WN 62 and WN 65 in Fox Green". I have made tentative reservations for the 27th for the three of us Browne's, if the Leonti's (see above names for reference) would like to join us, I can increase the reservation.  Let me know if this tour looks good to you.

Here is the link to the site and the specific tour.

Belgian Beer

After a really busy couple months, I'm ready to get back to focusing on our trip and one of the most important aspects of that trip: beer.

I don't have any doubts that there will be beer all through Belgium, but it might be cool to visit a brewery and get a tour. Stella Artois is there. Also Duvel, Chimay, Delirium Tremens (the one with the pink elephants).

Belgium is pretty small and we'll have a car for much of the time, so we can pretty much go anywhere we want.

I don't know if I've ever had "lambic" but they sell it at Trader Joe's and they make it at a place in Brussels that's easy to get to: http://www.cantillon.be/. So we should check that out.

And we should try to visit this monastery where they, apparently, make the best beer in the world: http://www.westvleteren12.com/. We'll see about that.

Here's a list of the Top 20 Belgian beers if you want to to start doing some research on your own: http://www.roughguides.com/article/top-twenty-best-belgian-beers/