Lots of amazing and very famous art here: Monet, Van Gogh, Dugal, Pissaro....

I was amazed by the sheer scale of some of the paintings (the entire wall of a large room) and the patience, time, skill, and paint they must have taken.

Interesting though, because our hosts spoke NO english and were also sub par at sherades.  For shame.  Sherades is the best.

This unfortunately is a sort of irritating experience to look back on.  We respectfully walked our bikes around the cemetary on the sidewalks to observe the sacrifices of our countrymen for France, etc.  We were quiet, kept our bikes off the grass, etc, and then when we were leaving, some french _àçèé(_àç"è comes and yells at us for taking our bikes in with us.  Excuse me for thinking it unfair for him to be so rude to two American kids visiting this amazing place, when it is obvious by the amount of expensive and uncarryable gear on our bikes that it would not be reasonable to ask us to leave them in the parking lot.  I felt disrespected and hurt, but we had already walked through, so we just brushed it off and continued on our way.

You can see the massive craters (created by allied bombs) behind us.  'Great mountain biking', says Zac. One unit of Americans were trained specifically to capture this point, from which the Germans could bomb a wide range of the beaches, and thus important to take.  But the cliffs they had to scale to evven reach level fighting ground made it a skilled and quite deadly mission.  Pretty amazing.  I don't think we have quite that calliber of people in my generation.