Normandy: Day Two

As it was raining rather hard, we slept in late, and didn't check out of our hotel until almost noon.  With the weather, we decided to spend the day seeing indoor sights, so we return to Caen via Chez McDonald's for lunch.

We then stopped into the Caen Memorial to World Peace, which is an expensive, but extremely interesting museum.  It has one of the best exhibits regarding World War II that I'd ever seen, all presented in French, English, and German.  One interesting exhibit was an audio recording that the Germans had made of the calls made by the Generals who signed the French armistice after the fall of Paris.  They didn't know the Germans were recording the call, and hearing the call was sort of like being a fly on the wall of history, as the two French generals decided how to handle the rather unusual situation.

We spent about 3 hours in the WWII portion of the museum, then another hour in the Cold War section, and a few minutes in the modern section, which contains beams from the World Trade Center.  We then nabbed a few post cards from the gift shop, and departed for Paris.

The drive back to Paris was uneventful, we stopped for fuel a bit outside the city, and I accidentally put about 3 litres of the wrong diesel fuel (the car used regular diesel, which is "Gasole" and I accidentally grabbed "Gasole sans soufre") into the car before I realized my mistake.  Fortunately, that wasn't enough to do any apparent harm, and I put in another 30+ litres of the proper fuel, at a cost of about 45 Euros.  I haven't worked out exactly what the cost is in dollars per gallon, but it was 1.15 Euros per Litre at that station, though the one next to the rental car return was only 1.07.

Holly successfully guided me through the busy streets of Paris to the rental car return station, which was only two blocks from our hotel, the Mercure Terminus Est, directly across the street from the train station.

We checked in to find a small, yet cozy and well-appointed room, and the cost for wireless was actually reasonable, unlike all the other hotels on the trip, and I had no bandwidth cap, so I used it to download a few episodes of the Daily Show to watch when I get a chance.

For dinner, we ate at a fast food place called "Quick" on the corner.  I had a "Supreme Cheese" and Holly had a "Long Chicken" which came with the dreaded mayonaisse on it, despite assurances from the teenager who took our order that it wouuld not.  Quick fries are much better than McDonald's fries, at least the French versions of them.  My burger was pretty tasty, with a strong black pepper flavor to it.  Holly scraped the mayo off her chicken, which she said was tasty as well.

We then returned to our hotel room where Holly crashed for the evening, while I tried to catch up on some blogging and web-reading.