Charlie’s Haus

Today I feel like Im Joe Bauers in the movie Idiocracy.  If you have never seen it, its because the studio tried to dump it as it makes fun of 90% of the population.  Even though the movie itself is pretty dumb, it is an excellent social commentary and where our world is heading at the current rate.  Today is one of those days where I feel like the main character.  Can people really be that stupid?  You dont have to answer that unfortunately.  /me sighs

OK, back to Europe.  We took a ferry from Ireland to France.  It was an interesting experience.  If  you ever do it, dont pay to upgrade to a “window.”  Your windows shade will always be drawn since people can look in otherwise….doh!  The ferry had everything, restaurants, gift shop, movie theatre.  It was crazy all the stuff to do. 

We arrived in France on Bastille day, which is their independance day.  Unfortunately for us, Bayeux where we were staying, had their celebration the night before.  We were pretty bummed about that.  Bayeux is pretty small, and there was nothing open (cause stores in Europe close by like 6pm on a regular day, so a holiday is out of the question).  We walked around and window shopped for a bit that day.  The next two days we spent on the battlebus.  Battlebus ( http://www.battlebus.fr/ ) was totally and utterly sweet.  I want to go back and do some more tours.  I learned a lot about WWII that I didnt know, and the sites were amazing.  The first day we did the American highlights tour.  We got to see the beaches, hit a couple museums, saw the place in Saint Mere-Egleise where the movie “The Longest Day” was shot and really took place in real life.  It was sweet.  The second tour was the Band of Brothers tour.  That was pretty amazing too.  It wasnt as scenic as the other one, but our guide Dale showed pictures from the movie to help remind us what we were looking at.  We got to learn some cool things about what really happened (dont believe everything you see on tv) in some of the battles.  If I could some it up in one word it would be amazing.  I cant rave enough about it.  Too cool.

While waiting at the train station in Bayeux, we met a few other americans, and this guy from Texas.  We only remember him cause hes like, So and So, Texas.  He had to throw that in.  It was hilarious.  So we took the train and made a short stop in Caen to the war museum there. It was a good museum, except that a few parts where in French only.  Still, it was definately worth seeing.  After that we continued on to Paris. 

Paris was a little different than I expected.  First of all, its Ginormous!  I really didnt expect that.  We did altogether way too much walking there.  We should have used the metros more.  It was much dirtier than I had expected.  But I guess that could be expected with how many people are around.  The sites again were good, and we had no problems with anyone being rude like we had been warned about.   The Louvre sucked.  I hated it.  Really.  The interesting thing is that its the worlds largest museum inside the worlds largest building.  Lets just say its intimidating.  It was way too spread out and the stuff there again was mostly only in French.  Not very helpfull for us stinky Americans  

We did have a picnic in front of the Eiffel Tower at Dusk and ate a pizza and drank wine.  That was cool.  We did go up in it to the first deck.  Im glad I saw it once, but that is good enough for me now.  Thats how the majority of the places are.  Especially the modern art museum (Centre Pompidou).  That was the most crazy stuff I have ever seen.  I definately would laugh at calling some of that stuff art.  For example, on “art piece” was a couple of inflatable furniture arranged on a display……shocking.  I wish I would have taken a picture to proven it.  Lucky it was a free site with the museum pass we bought.

Im sure Im forgetting something, but Mandi will leave a comment about that   I was pleasantly surprised by Paris not being what I had expected.  However saying that, I have no desire to ever go back there.  Ive seen everything I wanted to see there.  Bayeux on the other hand has potential still.  Mandi and I were talking and we think it would be cool to organize a family trip to Bayeux and do some WWII tours.  How fun would that be? 

Well thats it from France….next up is our final stop, Germany!

OK, so the reason I havent posted about the rest of Europe is because I was in Canada last week at my yearly Lake of the Woods Musky fishing trip.  It was kind of weird being back for 5 days and then leaving again for another week.  You sure burn a lot of vacation that way!  Anyways, as always it was a good time, and this year we had a phenominal showing.

We had 9 guys sharing our 8 man cabin, so it was a little crowded, but really, I was surprised that it didnt feel too crunched.  There were 4 boats between us.  In the boat with 3 people we had the priviledge of being in the presence of someone “famous.”  He writes for Musky Hunter magazine and was pretty cool about sharing information…a drastic change from last year.  The rest of the guys still kept pretty quiet about where they were fishing, but he would tell you everything.  That was very helpfull and helped you pattern things better.

This year we definately didnt do as much eating.  The 3 man group liked a different schedule.  They liked to get up at dawn, fish until 10 or 11am, then come in for brunch, take naps, play cards, etc.  They would then eat and leave to go back out around 4pm for the rest of the day.  Now I completely understand why they were doing it that way, but because of that, some of the other guys tried to follow suit.  That ended up in a giant clusterfuck of not knowing what was going on.  Normally we would eat around 7:30am, then pack lunches and come back between 2-5pm and eat then go back out right away.  I like that much better since after all, this is still a vacation and I am definately not an early riser. 

So I said we did well as a group, and we really did.  Between the 4 boats we caught 30 muskies.  Not bad at all.  I boated 3.  2-39’s and a 36.  I had one in the upper 40’s on (Im guessing around 48″) but after an awesome battle, I lost it boatside before we could get the net under her.  Very disappointing.  My boating partner Andy got only 1.  The rally hat came through for him and on the last night at dark (litterally last minute) he got a 46″ fish at the boat.  I expertly netted it, and that was the last fish of the trip for us. 

Here are two of the fish we got. One of my 39″ and Andy’s 46″:

I have decided that for next year I am going to do a lot of studying on muskies so that we know where to fish more.  We are battling 3 other boats filled with DNR guys, so I think we held our own pretty good.  Especially since this really was my 2nd time ever fishing for them.  I think I have Andy convinced that you dont need to be so far away from shore to catch fish (every cast was a power cast….that wears you out fast).  At the end he went to the other extreme and was way too close, but I wasnt about to complain since I had complained all week about being to far away =D  Baby steps. 

If anyone has some good lake of the woods forums, or some good musky forums, I would be happy to have some ideas on where to look on my quest for knowledge.  The only forum I know of dedicated to muskies is the musky hunter/fishinfo forum.  The information there is pretty slim though.

For the rest of the trip pics…go here http://www.charliemaurice.com/?page_id=286&g2_itemId=518