A few days in the life of a WWOOFer at Monfreville

The past few days have been excellent-- we've gone and done quite a few of the tourist things, and even though they're each completely different, they were all worth seeing. On Saturday we took the train to Bayeux, where the famous Bayeux tapestry is housed. We visited the museum and saw the tapestry, which is something like 70 meters long, and tells the story of William the Conquerer through detailed embroidered pictures. Afterwards, we walked around the town, visited the cathedral, and did some shopping. We also discovered a way that we could taste as many different pastries as possible without spending too much money and getting sick. Each of us would buy one thing, and we would split each thing into 3 pieces so that we could try everything. Our idea worked brilliantly, and we tried a ton of food.
On Sunday, June was really nice and drove us to the American war cemetery and Omaha beach, where the Americans landed on D-day, and where the beginning of Saving Private Ryan was set. There wasn't much to see on the actual beach, just a memorial statue. But then we went farther along the coast to the cliffs (Pointe du Hoc) where about 240 US soldiers landed and scaled the cliffs. On the top of the cliffs there were giant holes in the ground from shells and bombs, and dozens of German concrete bunkers. Some were completely destroyed, but you could alk right into others, and even see bullet holes in the walls and above the doorways.
ON Tuesday after lunch, we biked to the Caramel factory. They only give tous at 10am, but we went into the shop and got some really good caramels for cheap, not to mention handfuls of free samples. (Noah was good enough to sneak 2 pockets full when the store clerk went to stock a shelf).
Wednesday we had some cider with our lunch, and tasted a shot of Calvados after lunch. Calvados is a specialty drink of the region, which is made from apples, is really strong, and which is think tastes foul. We were then inspired to visit the nearest farm that produces cider and calvados and everything in between. We biked about 20 minutes and got to taste everything: sweet cider, dry cider, extra dry cider, an apperitif, a digestif, cavados, apple juice (which tastes nothing like the stuff at home--it's much better), and apple honey. As you can imagine, we were a little wobbly on the bikes on the way home. We were disappointed we couldn't buy a bottle of cider 5it was too big and too heavy to fit into our suitcases), but we did walk away with some of the honey and a mini bottle of apperitif.
Today, all 3 od us were assigned to a most unfortunate job after tea: mucking out the big sheep barn. This is where about 20 sheep spent the whole winter. It wasn't cleared out, just more and more straw was put down. In about 2 and a half hours, all 3 of us got about half of it cleaned out. There were about 5 layers, totaling about 4 inches of manure, and the stuff was really packed down. Sometimes we would hit spots where manure and stale urine had started to ferment, and the smell was almost unbearable. After a while; we got so sick of the smell that we created something that would help us overcome the smell. We each picked a bunch of sage from the garden, and got a roll of really wide masking tape. We then taked the sage to our upper lips, right below our noses. We looked absolutely ridiculous, and we couldn't take eachother seriously for the next 5 minutes, but the work progressed as usual, only things smelled a little better.