Thursday, August 12, 2010

July 31

Saturday July 31.




Cherbourg France



We woke up this morning to an early morning room service call. We had to meet at 8:15 in the Promenade Lounge for the tour to Tatihou Island.



It was hard to get the girls up and moving but room service arrived and we did make it on time.



There was a bus ride of about 40 minutes through some wonderful small French Villages, with lovely churches, graveyards and lots of lovely flowers. It was pretty early still so the villages were pretty quite but lots of people setting up the outdoor cafes beside the bakeries, and women walking with their baquettes.



It was a gray cool day but no rain. We arrived at a small port where we got onto an amphibian boat, being low tide we would be driving out around the oyster fields, at first it looked like they were for seaweed, but the tour guide said that they were for cultivating oysters.


 It was a short ride to the island and then we had a short walk through the gardens. There was a maritime museum that we were supposed to visit but we just walked past. The gardens were lovely, lots of interesting plants and some old shipbuilding remains.






There was an Adventure by Disney Guide with us also on the tour and they did try to make it more child friendly with a bird search when we got to the bird sanctuary but I felt bad for the guide as the only birds around were sea gulls. People were getting bored at this point so people started wandering off to the Vauban Tower. This was neat, a real drawbridge


and we were able to walk up the 4 or 5 stories and explore the tower.


Lots of steep spiral staircases.
View from the top




The view from the hill beside the tower



After this was a bit of a waste. Looking back I am assuming this was the free time that was listed on the tour description but the tour guide did not say anything and people just stood around waiting for something to happen. . We finally decided to head back and we got to check out the gardens and Lauren found a lovely coin of the Tower.




We met back at 11:30 to board the boat back to the port. The tide had come in so it was a boat ride to the bus.



The girls enjoyed the tower but the local tour guide was really hard to understand and he admitted that he did not normally go to this area, so I don’t think he knew that much about the tower, as looking at the tour description we missed a lot.



We got back to the ship about 1:00 and had lunch. I was hoping the girls would go to the clubs so I could head back into the town of Cherbourg and look around but the sun had come out and the girls wanted to go swimming.




The afternoon was spent on the pool deck, dinner was a rush as there was face painting in the clubs and the girls chill party was going on in the club.


A run in with a princess (look we match)



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