2 flat tires, 87k, & Utah Beach

We left cherbourg to immediate elevation rises.  Here is us leaving cherbourg.

I thought we might cut out some distance from our 90k plan, and picked a new more direct route.  Unfortunately, this route i guessed would shave off 90k to 50k. Instead in retrospect it changed it to 80k and made it significantly harder as the elevation changes were constant for the first half and killer.

 We arrived in quettehou and continued onto saint vaast-la-hogue for lunch.  The lunch was AMAZING.  I had a croque madame & eric had a croque chevre.  The desert looked good and some people next to us explained what was in it, but we ended up skipping dessert and going to stock up on water.

Upon leaving we passed a bike shop, and had we known it we should have stopped.  However instead we had a slow leak from a drop on the racer after the water and we biked on.  10km out of town the tire went dead and we pumped it. 1km later we pumped it again and it was immediately flat. ok tire change time right? no problem we had 1 spare.

Eric and i repaired the tire and we continued on viewing some german defense posts:

A shelter that caved in on itself after engineers blew it up.

 And then we made it to the north end of Utah beach:

 As we drove on, the tire died again.  This time we repumped it but realized we (i) broke the valve by screwing it too tight.  Never again will we use this type of valve.  So at this point we have biked for something around 8 hours, we have 0 bike tubes left for this tire, and we have 35km left to go.  Oh yeah, and its raining.  So we decided to use our spare tube for the bike with larger diameter tires, which worked and we are still cruising as of 2 days later on them. However we are posting two days later because we couldnt make it to carentan until late yesterday.

Utah beach memorial:

 We passed a store called michigan???

Our waitress brought us rosé wine instead of what we ordered, which was not very refreshing after a long dehydrating day. At least we fit in with the locals, as i've never seen so much rosé drank.  After 10 hours of biking i look very drunk after less than half a drink: