A lesson in History

This post is a few weeks overdue, my bad people but it's a free blog so you'll just have to wait.  Now finally getting around to it, wanted to share one of our recent weekend adventures to Normandy.  As an American who has always had interest in World War II history and having been to a number of different sites and museums in Europe, I thought it important to visit the D-Day beaches and see this location in history.

As per usual, we of course planned our trip with Stacey and Alex who joined us for the weekend in Normandy.  The train trip from Paris to the town of Bayeux was about 2 hours or so getting us in to Bayeux around 8:00 that night.  Stacey and Alex didn't arrive until much later so Cleaver and I had a nice dinner at this little bistro near our hotel and pretty much called it a night.  After all it was a long week of work and we had a fairly early start in the morning.

Any morning at a French B&B will begin with a nice spread of croissants, coffee, and other pastries and our place in Bayeux did not disappoint.  After the 4 of us had a nice French breakfast, the tour guide we hired for the day picked us up and off we go.  We had hired a tour guide for the full day tour which was definitely the way to go.  On the itinerary, Sainte-mère-église, Utah beach, Omaha beach, Pointe du Hoc, the American cemetery and he also took us to this little church that had a part in D-Day as well as it had been set up as a makeshift first aid post.  While taking us to these various sites our guide offered lots of history, stories, and explanations about the invasion, all of it quite interesting.

With so much information and so much that we saw that day, it's difficult to share everything but I'll mention a few highlights.  First the beaches, both Utah and Omaha.  Having read so much over the years, seeing movies, and then finally standing there on the beach looking at the cliffs and the water, hard to imagine what actually occurred there.  Very surreal to stand there and consider how many people died and the significance of the event on so many levels.  Looking at for example Pointe du Hoc and seeing all of the holes in the ground caused by pre invasion bombing, seeing the German bunkers and fortification, and imagining what it must have been like for the soldiers there, all made for a fascinating experience to be standing in that same location.

Pointe du Hoc

Also of interest was Sainte-mère-église where many of the paratroopers that were first on the ground landed and as we found out then made famous by the book and movie "The Longest Day".  Most famously the square and church which had a few paratroopers get their parachute caught on the roof and today they memorialize this with a "dummy" stuck on the side of the church.

Last stop of the day was the American cemetery with 9,387 graves and a memorial at one end of the site.  Similar to the rest of the day, very interesting and very surreal to walk these grounds, a very worthwhile experience and highly recommended to be sure.  Not just the cemetery, but the entire day.

American Cemetery

A few other notes from the weekend, the town of Bayeux is a very cute small French town.  We had a wonderful dinner on Saturday night and on Sunday spent some time walking around.  Like most towns in Europe there is a giant church which was quite impressive and we also discovered they have a museum with a 70 meter long tapestry made in 1070 to tell the the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England which was kind of neat.

After walking around the town for a bit, we started to make our way back to the train station and back to Paris after a very interesting weekend of history.