VERY early start today after a tremendous breakfast at our hotel in Rouen...we hit the road for a long day of traveling to the Normandy coast. The bus trip was a chance to catch up on lost sleep and catch a view of French farm countryside. Our first stop was Pont du Hoc, the bluff atop a 100 foot cliff which was stormed by U.S. Rangers in the early hours of the D-Day invasion in June, 1944. All the bomb and shell craters, ruined gun emplacements and concrete blockhouses, and debris from that day have been left as they were. Time has softened them and covered the stark details with grass, but the view of the Utah and Omaha Beach invasion area is unchanged. No wonder the Rangers had to take this spot and destroy the big guns they expected to find there, to protect the troops coming ashore at Utah and Omaha. Miraculously, the sun popped out while we explored.
Next destination was the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, an amazing site. It's officially American soil, with almost 10,000 buried there. The mood was respectful and restrained; this place is an open air monument to the Americans who died in this campaign. Weather was cold, windy, sometimes rainy, and steely-grey.
Our lunch stop was the beachfront town of Arromanches. The skies exploded with a hard rain just as we be-bussed, so we ran for the first restaurant we could find, "Hotel de Normandie"...it ended up being a good choice. Most of us practiced our French, ordering from the menu, and the restaurant staff patiently put up with it. The food was sometimes surprising: pancake with ham and cheese inside and a semi-fried egg on top; baguette sandwich about 18" long, etc. etc. Fun food stop.
After our lunch exploration, we drove to Caen, a small town inland from the invasion beaches, where we visited an elaborate museum of WWII from the Normandy perspective. Perhaps the most impressive single site there for me was a huge aerial photo of Caen immediately after the war, totally bombed out with almost no intact buildings at all, save for one lone ancient cathedral, seemingly untouched among all the rubble. Wow, for the people of this region of France, the Normandy invasion wasn't just some theoretical event learned in a history lesson.
We left Caen for another long transit to the tiny village of Plancoet, the site of our hotel for the next 2 nights. It's a converted abbey, and we just finished a scrumptious evening meal of beef bourgnon (sp?). The town is small enough to explore on foot in a half hour, and as scenic and typically French as we could ever hope for. Hey, have you noticed how important food has become on our trip?!
I'll post more pics at: http://picasaweb.google.com/jlphil7584/2010EnglandFranceTrip02#
Thanks for reading!
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