Nous sommes arrives en France. Took the Eurostar – fast and easy from St Pancras to Paris, rented a car and headed North to Bayeux. Couldn’t have been easier. We have settled into a lovely hotel, full of Americans and Brits on their way to explore Normandy. It has the best Wifi so far, fast and free!! That’s the way we like it. This AM after being fortified with chocolat chaud and croissants we headed for Omaha beach. It was foggy and cool all day, good exploring weather. Declan has been pumped to go here for months.
Being out on that beach is awesome in the true sense of the word. You know the stories, you’ve seen the movies but walking on that beach today, as foggy and windy as it was, it gave one a palpible sense of what it must have been like as a 18 year old, after months of training, heading towards that beach and praying that the Germans wouldn’t pick you off, or you wouldn’t drown or you’d make it through the next 24 hours. That water looked cold and those hills were high.
We drove to the American cemetery where over 9000 are buried. Fantastic visitors center with an honor roll call, specific stories about a few of the guys who are buried there, and an interactive site where you can find a specific grave. There were 3 Robisons and 1 Morrissey buried there.
The a lunch of omlettes and fresh mussels et frites for lunch and then back to the coast where we saw Pointe du Hoc where 200 Army Rangers climbed up a 200 ft cliff, took out a German gun fortification and hung on for two days while they waited for reinforcements. There are tons of craters and bunkers and stuff to climb over and metal rebar sticking out of the ground to snag your ankle on. Tetanus city! It was fantastic.
Then off to see some more fortifications. Then home for dinner and WiFi. Cal had a good afternoon chasing Declan and insisting that he see, climb, and do everything exactly the same way. Same D-Day experience, same pizza for dinner, same crepe for dessert. But he slept in the car for a while and missed this HUGE gun fortification near Juno Beach...
At dinner we talked about why WWII still has such a hold over us even now. Blake says that it was the last war of consensus which everyone understood as good vs. evil. I think that it was because we were willing to sacrifice so much for something bigger than ourselves: freedom and liberty. They seemed more tangible because they were threatened. Declan thinks it was because of the cost, in life, property and money. What do you think?
Demain, Mont St. Michel.
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