...and more travelling...

So April 22nd was our first anniversary. Being the good husband that I am I took my wife to Paris for the day.
We went to church at "The American Church in Paris", which was the first church plant by Americans in Paris over 150 years ago. They built a nice cathedral style building right on the Seine.
For lunch we ate the popular "moules et frites" at one of the brasseries. They say that the Mussels from Brussels are the best, but I'm not sure we'll get to try that before we leave.
Then we went to the Pompidou Center, which is basically the modern art museum in Paris. It was quite modern. I'll leave it at that.
We visited a nice park, got some sun, and then slowly made our way back home.

Later in the week, my brother Jake came to visit. We rented a car for the weekend, and on Saturday we drove to St. Malo, a port town in Bretagne. There is an old part of town that is really just a walled area with well planned buildings and many tourist shops and restaurants. We walked out on the beach to a fort on the rocks and ate lunch. A seagull joined us and eventually managed to beg an apple core off of us. We then investigated the tidepools with all the different types of shellfish and seaweed.
From the port we decided to take a short cruise, but as soon as we got on the boat an extremely thick fog rolled in. We got a few pictures, but the whole ride had a spookeyness because you could hear a lot more than you could see. I was expecting a ghost pirate ship to fade in for a few seconds out in the distance.


From St. Malo we drove to Mont St. Michel, which is a majestic abbey built on top of an enormous rock-island in the middle of a very flat estuary. We did not make it in time to go inside the abbey, but we did walk around the spiraling town street leading up to the cathedral. Of course there were lots of tourist shops, complete with the kind of restaurants that give you watered down wine.


Speaking of wine, the next afternoon we went hunting in our region for a winery. We drove around for an hour stopping at closed winery after closed winery. It wasn't so bad because we got to see a whole lot of countryside that was rather beautiful with all the freshly green leaves. Right after we had given up on our quest we saw a sign that advertised a winery being open on Sunday. We made our way there and learned all about the winemaking process from one of the younger guys working there. They were very generous with their tasting samples, but I had to let Elizabeth and Jake do most of the critiquing. We ended up getting a variety pack of six (yes, a six pack of wine) for about 30 euros and splitting that with Jake. Not a bad deal if you ask me.