It was the coldest, cloudiest day of our entire trip.  So we went to the beach.  When life gives you lemons, right?

After a little research (and I mean little), we packed up our towels (also little) and headed for Trouville.  What a pleasant surprise!  We’d been to several coastal towns in Normandy that week, but this was by far the most charming.  Families sharing ice cream cones, kids playing soccer in the sand, and so many striped beach tents.  M was pretty taken with the architecture just along the beach and I was totally transfixed by the murals everywhere.  They almost looked like a page torn out of an old children’s book, so sweet and faded.

We immediately took to the water.  There was splashing and superman-ing and somersaulting through the waves before returning to our teeny towels for apples and a swig of Calvados.  Ahh, the beach life.

Dinner that night was a slighty un-French round of tapas at a wine bar in town, served by a happy man who did not speak English.  He learned quickly of our language barrier, but decided not to dumb anything down.  Instead he spoke in such a diverse range of tones and inflections that the actual combinations of sounds and letters being used did not matter much.  We understood each other just fine, and he quickly became one of our favorite interactions.  That night we realized the human-to-human connection is far more powerful than any organized arrangement of words.