THE HAWK WALKERS

Here’s how we are camping in our house. We have towels under the doors, and we have put up a sign to keep out the bats.

The saga of the bats is, hopefully, over.  It's a pretty boring denoument.  The exterminator was here today and closed off all opportunities for the bats to get in and apparently put up the tiny exit signs. I haven’t been up in the attic to look. With any luck, this is our final bat picture.

We were all sitting outside at dusk, waiting for the bats to fly away from the house. (Before the exclusion -- which is what they call closing up all the holes.) We did see some bats, but we couldn’t see where they were coming from, and definitely couldn’t see that they were coming from our house.

　

We have a group that goes for a walk just about every night. Some nights we have as many as eight people and a dog but most nights there are just three or four of us. We started our nightly walks a year ago when we had a hawk nest with four chicks in the neighborhood, and now it’s time for the hawks to come back, so we go out looking for them in the evenings. Tonight we saw one of the hawks sitting up in the tree they nested in last year, so we’re hoping they’ll nest there again. And raise another family.

Right now we have an extra incentive, which is to get oranges. There are lots of oranges around the neighborhood,

and we’ve finally figured out that if we go out with the giant orange picker, we can go up to someone’s door and ask for the oranges that are too high for them to pick.

They’re so delighted to get the oranges they can’t reach, that they’re happy to let us have some.


Usually around the evening walk time, we also have various cats who are out around dusk. And sometimes we get to stop and talk to a parrot if he’s outside.

ANOTHER EXCITING DAY AT THE BAT CAVE

After careful consideration, anxiety attacks, and general worrying because of what we've read about bat bites and rabies, john reached what I thought was ultimate anxiety level and called kaiser and made an appointment for today, Monday.
I was wrong. The ultimate anxiety was at 3am when he insisted he was feeling weird and we went to ER.
From what we read it appears a person could be bitten by a bat and not know it because they have very small teeth. At the ER they said that of they suspect it at all you get rabies shots.
They start today with seven shots that they keep promising will be painful and that no one on duty has ever given before, so it's hard to tell whose anxiety level is highest, nurse or patient.
As I write this it's 7 am and I think he was first seen about 4:45
I was already so tired I thought I was going to drive off the road on the way over here.
I'm also still trying to get ahold of Orkin to cancel our 8am appointment.
Finally they came in and gave him the shots. Five immunoglobulin and one vaccination. He has to come back in 3 days, 7 days, and 14 days for more shots. But apparently only one each time now. And they give these in the muscle -- arms and legs, not the stomach like they used to. The nurses double-teamed on this to give him 2 at a time. He says it wasn't too bad.
But then, he thought he was going to die so I guess it's all relative.
The sad thing about this is that he caught the bat that may or may not have bitten him and they could have tested it, but he threw it away.
We also know one more piece of information which is if you wake up with a bat in your bedroom and you don't catch it, they assume you've been bitten and treat it as rabid.
Since we'd been up since 3 am we came home and went to sleep. Right now we have the bedroom as a bat-free zone by putting towels under all the doors and only going in through the bathroom.

When I woke up, Santa Claus had been here and brought my new modem. Yippee!! I'll be back on line soon. NOT.
The damn thing is acting like my first one did. Plays red light green light forever. Went through all the troubleshooting, took a mini vacation to India ended up with the AT&T guy coming out here and looking at our wiring with amazement. I think he thought he might go up in the attic to see how some stuff was connected up, but being as how that's where the bats probably live, we decided to skip that. I told john he could go in the attic because he's vaccinated now. I should probably get him to take me to the vet and get a vaccination, too
Anyway, $155 later, I have my "free"modem installed and I'm BACK ON LINE. 

STEP UP TO THE BAT

Usually I don’t have much of interest to say after I come home from a vacation. So the blog goes away for awhile. Not this time.

Homecoming so far has been pretty entertaining, at least if you don’t live in our house.

While I was gone, John said a bat hit him in the face while he was asleep, and he woke up swatting it. Then he got up and searched for it, finally found it on the floor by the head of the bed, hit it and stunned it and sucked it up with the vacuum cleaner. Then he apparently (at about 2 a.m.) vacuumed up everything in the room, including the closets, stuck a sock in the opening of the vacuum cleaner and went to bed. The next morning it was still in the cleaner bag alive and he killed it and threw it in the trash.

When he told me this story, I wondered if it was really a bat, because we have some giant moths, and he has the same reaction to moths, especially when anything wakes him out of a sleep, he wakes up fighting.   

That’s what I thought until last night. I was putting away stuff from my trip and walked into the back sunporch -- the one that Richard has taken all the walls off in preparation for the window job that he apparently plans to do before he dies, but not necessarily before I die -- and there was a bat on the floor. I closed the door and left and went to get John, who of course is somewhere else in the house and can’t hear me yelling hysterically. We went back up there, and of course couldn’t find it. Then we had Tim and Lynda come over, and still couldn’t find anything.
So we sat down to watch Fringe. And then, there was a bat flying around the living room. John’s reaction was to go get the broom and start flailing it around (remember, our living room is practically a glass museum, with the added attraction of other tippy fragile things, like harps. ) I hear the broom crash down on the harpsichord and say "Remember, there’s more than the bat in here." The bat of course is flying around crazily because everything in the room is in motion.
Of course, it’s a little difficult for him to hear exactly what I’m saying, because I have a blanket over my head. I think in an emergency it’s important to do what you are best at, which in my case is run and hide. But finally I took the blanket off my head and decided to go hold the front door open, so that if he does shoo it out, it will have a way to leave. And the bonus is that I get to get between the screen door and the wall, relatively shielded from marauding bats. But in fact, while I’m standing there, I think that I see the bat fly out.
Again, I call Tim and Lynda, but while I’m on the phone, I think I see the bat flying down the stairway. Now I’m unsure whether there are two bats or when I thought I saw the bat fly across the porch he was really still in the house but on the other side of the glass. Lynda came over and brought her fishing net so we could try catching it if we saw it again, but of course they don’t show up when anyone else is here.  

So here is the troupe: man with broom, woman with fish net, woman with blankie over her head. The intrepid crew stalks around the house, searching for prey, but finds nothing. Is there one bat? Two? Three? How many are still in the house? I don’t know. I’m not getting too far from my blankie, though.

Up until this time, I’ve been falling asleep, because I’m still jetlagged, even though it’s only 10 p.m. But now I’m afraid to go to bed. So we’re going all around the house putting towels under all the doors, because most of our doors have plenty of space for a little bat to crawl under it. We think we created a safe zone in the bedroom, and since none attacked during the night, that seems to have worked.
It’s now morning, and I want to call some pest control people. But the phone book is in a closet that has an open area above it that we thought last night might be an area where the bats are living. I finally swallow my fear and open the door, fully expecting to be assaulted by a swarm of bats, but that doesn’t happen, thank god. 

My calls to pest control people, because, it’s, you know, Saturday, aren’t exactly what I was hoping for. (Picture a knight on a white horse or a guy in a hazmat suit for what I’ve been hoping for.) But guess what? They won’t come out and search and destroy the bats. One company will give a free inspection and estimate, the other wants a good amount of money but gives me a lot more information.
It seems you have to find where they’re coming in, block that off, and create an exit. I’m thinking of all the places they could be in the house, and the fact that there are so many doors and I ask the guy if they put up little tiny exit signs for them to go out. He claims that they can always find it. 

And then he says the dreaded words, "If you’ve seen one bat, and especially if you’ve seen two, I can guarantee you there are more." Well, isn’t that just what I wanted to hear.
At the end of our conversation, as we’re making an appointment for TUESDAY!!! he tells me about their other services for eliminating bugs, and I tell him I don’t really need those, because I have the bats for that.

So now we have to wait three days for a technician to come out. In the meantime, John is combing the house for chinks in the armor, of which there are MANY as it turns out. I’m also a little concerned about the fact that while we were looking for the bats last night, I saw about 5 dead wasps on the windowsill in the sunporch, and they weren’t there when I left. We’ve had a wasp problem in that area before, but that was about 20 years ago and there hasn’t been anything since then. But then, we used to have a wall there, too, instead of just the studs and the outside wall.
We think we’ve created a bat-free zone in the bedroom, and are leaving the doors closed and only accessing it through the bathroom, which is now a sort of a vapor lock. I slept with the sheet over my head all night.

HOMECOMING

Our flight home was really a kind of comedy of if not errors, than just basically screwed up.

For starters, we had checked and double checked with Grand Circle to be sure they had ordered a wheelchair for Zoe, which allows her to navigate the airport AND breathe, and also allowed her to hold my Volkswagen-size backpack so I don’t have to carry it on my bum shoulder. And yes, I know

I could take less stuff with me and then it wouldn’t be so heavy, but I can’t stand to travel without my computer.

First of all, the airport shuttle let us off at a door marked Air France, but the ticket counter where we were supposed to check in was 6 counters away. A long walk for Zoe. First off, our Grand Circle guide didn’t bother to tell us until we were half checked in at the kiosks that we weren’t supposed to check in there, then she starts us on a double-time forced march down to counter 10. She’d get about 20 feet ahead of us and then act like we were purposely slowing her down. We kept gasping wheelchair, wheelchair. Finally she stopped at a place where there were four wheelchairs and two pushers. There was a lot of negotiating in French that I couldn’t follow, but the ultimate answer was "Non."

When we got to the counter, she abruptly handed us off to someone and told us to "stand in this line, someone will help you." The person in front of us in this line turned around and said, "you should really go to another counter, because I’m going to be awhile."

I thought we shouldn’t but Zoe said she was going to act like a pushy New Yorker and went over to the other counter where they helped us. But still, the wheelchair thing was screwed up. The counter person said, "Do you want the wheelchair now?" I’m being very polite and not saying DUH.

"Okay, then, go over there to the right and wait. Someone will be there." After 20 minutes, nobody was there, so we decided to walk, since she can manage a good distance at a slow pace. On the way, we passed the same four wheelchairs with the same two pushers plus one more, still apparently on their café break, or perhaps they were on strike. We asked again and got the same answer, "Non." By then we had found a baby stroller and put our carry-ons on it and tried to get to the security area with that – also trying to explain to the guard about the wheelchair, etc. Again, the answer was "Non."

Eventually we made it through immigration and security, and only after we left there did we realize that I no longer had Zoe’s cane. I went back to security, but it wasn’t there. I should have gone back through security at that point, because I knew I had it when I was at immigration, because I had been using it all the time we were in a line to keep a certain ambitious person from crowding in front of us every time we went around a corner.

After we went to wait at our gate, I decided to give it one more try, and actually went back out through security and got someone to go on the other side of immigration and search for me, but it was gone. Probably that girl I had kept at bay with it realized what a good tool it was and took it for her own purposes.

Nice flight. Delicious food on Air France. I watched five movies, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Iron Lady, My Week with Marilyn, something about people’s time running out, and a cute French movie about warring children in adjoining villages in about the 60s.

Arrival in SF. Hallelujah! The wheelchair is waiting for us. Except there are 7 passengers who need wheelchairs, 6 wheelchairs, and 2 people to push them. They solve this problem by pushing two at a time about 50 feet, then going back and getting the next two, then going back and getting the next two, then going back and getting the last person. Then they do the next 50 feet the same way. They do this about 6 times before we get to immigration.

Then they line them up in the line closest to the door, which was marked for US citizens but since there are many more foreigners in the hall by the time the wheelchair choo choo is complete and they could possibly start moving up to the window, they have allowed a group of 30 foreigners, all single students, it appears to me, to move over to this window. Based on the time it took to process them, they were apparently all suspected terrorists.

The upshot of all this is that while our flight was only 11 hours, maybe even 10 hours and 40 minutes, by the time we got to the car it was after 3, so we had to drive home in SF traffic, and it was 22 hours from getting up to getting home.

  Also, while I was away, the modem/router for the computer died, so all the effort I had put into getting John an iPad and having him get comfortable with email all went away because there was no signal in the house.

I would have pulled my hair out if I had been without my daily/hourly/minutely internet fix, but he did manage to eventually go down to the library and use it there.

I called ATT and went through the usual threats and promises and eventually got them to agree to give me a new one for the cost of shipping, so I saved about $85 there. That’s on the good side. On the bad side, I won’t get it until next week, which means I’ll spend all the money I saved buying coffee so I can use the internet six times a day. 

Maybe I need to learn to live without my computer.  Noooooooooooooooooo!!!

MONT ST. MICHEL AND CHARTRES CATHEDRAL

Mont. St. Michel This is one of the best touristic sites in France. It is a site of pilgrimage, a site for tourists, and for about 30 people, home. There is a town at the bottom and a monastery at the top.

When you approach the place, it appears to float above the horizon and then suddenly, it’s only floating in the water. We arrived about 20 minutes before high tide, at which time the water actually comes in to the bottom of the town and the parking areas are inundated. In another hour or two, cars can aagain park in the area, but as we arrived, the bus could only turn around and leave after letting us off. Because of the silting of the estuary, it’s been decided that the levee road, or berm or whatever it’s called, will be removed, as will the parking areas, I suppose.

I think they must be planning on building a bridge there. Additionally, the river is dammed upstream for the sole purpose of managing the way the water flows and the silt collects, no saving water, no generating electricity. Once we got there we had another day of having a tour with our wonderful guide Benedict. She took us to the small church that is for the village, and it’s best described as cute, because everything in the town is tiny because of lack of space. Then we started our climb up the hill. Zoe made it quite far up, but the last part of the trip up to the monastery, was way too steep. I think it was about 70-80 steep steps, all together. I think that with enough time, she might have made it, but once you get into the top part, you kind of have to move along. It’s very plain, slightly colored glass in some places, but no real “pictures” in glass. Most of what you see up there is the refectory and the eating hall where the king came from time to time.

One of the more interesting things is a human wheel (sort of like a hamster wheel) that several men would walk in to make it turn and provide the power to haul the stones up the side of the mountain on a large sledge. (Benedict is standing in front of the sledge).

The visit to the Mont is, in a way, less about aquiring information, though that’s interesting, and more about just absorbing the place. Of course when you go with a tour group, it’s hard to absorb much of the atmosphere, except the atmosphere of tourist. I had remembered it as being a hard walk, but I didn’t think it was this time. Even those stairs didn’t kill me as they usually would, and I have no idea why. Here are four pictures from a little diorama where you can see how Mont St. Michel has grown over the centuries since the Archangel Michael told Obert to build a church at the top of the hill.

After we left Mt. St. Michel we took an unplanned side trip to a German soldiers memorial from WWII. It is nicely maintained, but not supported by their government as the American cemeteries are. And it’s a mausoleum rather than a cemetery. I did find a Graf there, but he wasn’t from Baden. This cemetery also had families and German civilians as well.

Our final stop of the day was a charming little city called Cancale. We got lost on the way because roads were flooded from the very high tide, and then we had a chance to take pictures from above.

We went to Cancale to have raw oysters. I opted out.

Tuesday we’re basically returning to Paris, but we had an included tour of Chartres cathedral, which turned out to be a mess. First of all, we had to change the schedule and take our tour at noon instead of 1:30 or 2, because there was a funeral scheduled at 2. But being French, the guy who rented the headphones wasn’t there, and we had the most soft-spoken tour guide I’ve ever heard, including the fact that she was the least successful English speaker we’ve had. And if that weren’t enough, the organist came in and started practicing for the upcoming funeral, and whatever we might have heard was over. But wait, there’s more. The church is undergoing a renovation and the story of the whole history of the world which is in carvings at the front of the church, is totally covered up. They have a rather impressing trompe de l’oiel imitation behind the altar, (modern, on plywood, to hide the restoration work) but it was sad to miss seeing the carvings.

The tympanum over the door outside the church has a bunch of musicians on it, but I'm not sure you can see them too well in this picture.

The organ sounded wonderful, though, but we left the church in the middle of the tour and had a good lunch across from the church at a charming restaurant, which will probably be our last nice meal in France.

Our bus driver is a magician. He parked this giant bus in a parking place that is only about 5 feet bigger than the bus. He has done some really amazing feats with a bus that was never meant to navigate through a little town like this. He's from the Czech Republic and the bus he's using is new on this trip. These little towns have such tight corners and navigation hazards and I think this one is something like 20 meters long.

Yikes. Sometimes we have to jockey back and forth around corners. Today he did the really impressive feat of parallel parking this behemoth in a space that was only 5 feet longer than the bus. He's standing in all the extra space on this picture

ST. MALO AND DINAN

This was a fun day. It rained off and on all day, which was a bit of a pain, but not really all that bad. My fine thrift store poncho, which looks incredibly dorky, worked just fine. We had two events today, one an included tour of the town of St. Malo and the other a little trip to a town across the way called Dinand. 
St. Malo, where we went briefly yesterday afternoon and I got lost, is a charming walled city. It had a heyday as a shipping port in the 18^th century, importing spices, cloth, cacao, and coffee from Africa and the East, and occasionally gold from the new world.

We started with a tour of a little museum called the Corsair’s house. A Corsair was, or could be, a pirate. The difference between a corsair and a run of the mill pirate was that a corsair had a letter from the king saying it was all right to plunder and pillage, and you couldn’t be killed, whereas a regular old pirate had no such letter and could be killed. Our guide was the best one I’ve had on one of these trips because she was funny and generally kept your attention. In the picture, she’s showing us the tool corsairs used to climb aboard a ship and injure, but not kill people. The room had a couple of show-off public rooms for the owner to impress possible clients to buy his goods, and a small, totally sealed room accessed by a secret passage and a staircase that was about 1-1/2 feet wide to conduct real business.

Following that, we did a little walk around the town, visited the cathedral (which every one of our guides has insisted on explaining that just because it’s a big church it isn’t a cathedral if a bishop doesn’t preside there.) Most of St. Malo was destroyed during WWII by American bombs because the Nazis were there, but the American government paid to rebuild it, and thank you very much. And they restored it to the way it had been. I think the last piece of the restoration was finished in 1975. One of the "good" things that happened in the bombing was that a floor had been installed in the cathedral behind the altar at some past time, and no one knew that it was basically a false floor and the real floor was about 15 feet below it. Since the church was built into rock, when the bomb hit the church, it made a big hole which shouldn’t have been likely, and that’s how they discovered it.

She was going to show us the organ, because she is the organist in this church, but time got away from us.

At the end of our tour we stopped at a creperie and had a gallette, which is a flat crepe made with buckwheat and has something savory in it, in this case ham, emmenhalter cheese and mushrooms. Then we had a dessert crepe which had chocolate in it. We also had hard cider.

Following our tour of St. Malo, we crossed the bridge and stopped to see a power plant which is one of only two in the world built this way. It sits under a bridge and is built to capture both the incoming and the outgoing tide to make electricity. The bridge is between the river and the ocean, and is also a drawbridge and also has a lock incorporated into it. The tides here are about 12 feet every 12 hours, and I think we are here around a full moon.

Dinan is across the bay about 20 kilometers from St. Malo. It’s another charming old town with a wall around it, but its natural fortification of being more or less on a cliff meant that the wall is in some ways more for looks. We saw a nice church which was a Romanesque church but had a gothic front put on it when that became popular, but was still the stodgy roman style inside. It was quite dark in that end of the church, but a later gothic addition near the altar was bright because of the extra light.

It was raining a lot while we were here so we didn’t really do much walking, though we saw some of the architecture including some interesting looking wooden buildings. Then we were going to walk down the old commercial street that went to the docks, I think mostly to see how difficult it would have been to haul goods up from the docks, but I think she decided that we were too old and feeble to walk down the wet cobblestone street without one of us falling.

Finally we went down to another little tourist town that I suspect has never seen a tourist bus before. In fact this is a larger than usual bus, and our guides are continually asking the driver to go places I wouldn’t try to drive my Corolla. And he does it!! I think he’ll get a pretty good tip from the passengers for all his virtuoso driving. Anyway, we went to this little beach town, and the wind was howling and it was raining.

It was about 40 degrees out and there were 12 guys hotdogging in windsurfers out in the water. I really blew up a part of a picture of one of them, but it’s not that good.

beach at 5 p.m.

Our hotel is only a block from the beach, so when we got home I walked to town on the beach while Zoe took a nap. Then I went back two hours later, about 8 p.m. and took another picture on the beach trying to show the difference in the tide. I’d like to go out again now, but there’s a relatively complicated system for getting back into the hotel after 10 p.m., and I’m not sure I can manage it.

beach at 8 p.m.

Last night we had a wonderful dinner of moules and frites. Today we ate leftover cheese and crackers in our room. But we were through with dinner by 8 instead of our usual 9:30, which is probably why I’m usually so tired. I bought another box of macarons today. I love them. (We've already eaten half the box.)

CAEN PEACE MUSEUM & ST. MALO

We started our extension trip today. The first part of the day was all about getting off the ship, redistributing passengers, and general housekeeping issues.

There are about 120 or so people on this cruise, so they have us divided into three groups for our various outings. To keep it simple, we are red, yellow or green. Zoe & I are yellow. Now that the cruise is ending there are people going to Paris tonight to fly home tomorrow, people going to Paris tonight to go to London tomorrow, and people like us, who are going to St. Malo in Brittany tonight.

(y the way, I always thought Mt. St. Michel was in Normandy, it’s actually in Brittany. Shows you what I know – nothing. This morning they took us to the Caen Peace Museum and it was really interesting. It totally wasn’t what I expected, because it was really about war. I guess I expected lambs grazing in the field. But they had wonderful exhibits. They had oral histories from people who had been children during the war, and who described being in a bombing raid, for instance. All the stories and all the exhibits were done in French, English and German.

Then they showed a movie which had no narration, but they showed the Germans on one side of the screen and the Allies on the other side at the same time in the Normandy Debarkment (as they call it here, not the Invasion) It was a whole new way to see it.

After the film, they let you go downstairs to the museum, which mostly contains pictures of various things from WW2, people, places, etc. It’s extremely well presented, has sections about collaboration, resistance, holocaust, and a number of other categories, all in three languages. Zoe has moved into a mode where she keeps losing things. She lost her new hat today, probably when she took it off in the movie theater. Last night she thinks she lost at least 50 Euros, but I rather believe that will turn up. I doubt she has actually lost it.

Aha, I wrote that on the bus, and now we’re in the hotel and I dumped out her purse and voila, the Euros were there.

When we got to the hotel this afternoon, we did a quick turnaround and took a little walk around the ramparts of the old city of St. Malo.

It was a nice walk, and although it was raining when we started, of course it stopped as soon as one of our members bought an umbrella. St. Malo has the extreme tides that Mont St. Michele has, duh, like that’s a surprise since Mont St. Michele is about 5 miles from here. / So this afternoon the tide was out, and people were walking all over in the tidelands, which are such that you can walk all the way out to some sort of a defense place out in the bay, and also there’s a museum that you can walk to at low tide.

Reminds me a lot of Mount St. Michael in Penzance. I’m just posting a few random pictures. One is of a swimming pool of salt water, though I have no idea who is hardy enough to swim in this at any time of the year.

HONFLEUR AND THE BAYEUX TAPESTRIES

Today is our last night on the boat, and we have a full day today. We are docked today at Honfleur, which is a totally adorable place, made even more adorable today by the fact that it’s a market day and also a holiday because tomorrow is Easter. 

It’s an old city, Honfleur comes from norse words meaning up the river and there was another port on the other side that was a bit downstream, but it eventuallly silted up.  n the present day, across the river on the other side, which we can’t see from our ship, is Le Havre.
I don’t have much to tell about this town, other than it’s so cute and picturesque, and I’m just going to post the pictures. There’s a fishing harbor, though not much commercial fishing left, a farmer’s market where they are selling what we usually get at farmer’s market, but also including various kinds of cooked foods and also a small flea market is there today as well. 

There was a real organ grinder, but apparently he didn’t have enough money for a monkey, so he brought an old, fairly lazy cat. The organ grinder kept having to shoo a pigeon away from the cat’s food, because the cat was too lazy.
I’m writing this on the bus, as we have just been to visit the Bayeux tapestries They were absolutely wonderful. We were allowed to go into a darkened room and given headsets, and as we walked through the room looking at the tapestry, they told us the story that the tapestry describes. It’s not really a tapestry, by the way, but a 200 foot long embroidery which culminates in the Battle of Hastings. It tells the story of Harold, who made an oath to defend William (the Bastard’s) right of succession to be king of England when Edward died. But as soon as Edward died, he decided to try to gain the throne himself. He was crowned but there was argument whether Edward had changed his mind or Harold had stolen it from William. Seven months later, Haley’s comet appeared, and the people figured he was being punished for having broken his oath. Eventually William decided to mount an attack, which was eventually successful, making him William the Conqueror in 1066.
We couldn’t take any pictures, and we didn’t spend any time in town, so I have no pictures for this visit. It was the best museum of the trip for me, though. I was sorely tempted to buy a kit to embroider a pillow from one of these, but stopped myself just in time and before I spent 66 Euros on it as well.
Tonight we had our Easter bonnet contest (since tomorrow is Easter) then the Captain’s dinner, then trying to pack all our souveniers into our suitcase so we can leave tomorrow. Tomorrow we visit the Caen peace memorial and our group divides up. Some of us will go on to Brittany, some will go to London, and the rest will go home. I think we’re going to stay in St. Malo tomorrow nighte.  Here are some Easter bonnet pictures from our Easter bonnet contest tonight.  You were supposed to make an Easter bonnet from whatever you had available.  I forgot to get a picture of my own or Zoe's, but we didn't win anyway.