Normandy

The Blew family is on the move again.  A few days ago we left our comfortable apartment in Paris and headed west in our rental car to Normandy, where we’re spending the next few days visiting the D-Day beaches and Mont Saint Michel.

As I write this we’re in a very homey little “gite” in the tiny town of Saint Aubin de Terregatte.  The boy is sleeping upstairs and J is watching When Harry Met Sally next to me on her Macbook.

If we could, we probably would have stayed in Paris for a few more weeks, but things are already booked for the next couple of months so we had to move on.  With our bags all packed we hopped the #63 bus to Gare de Lyon, grabbed our rental car from Sixt, and hit the road.

[Aside:  Dealing with the car rental agent almost entirely in French was interesting.  I think that I rented the car for 4 days with no insurance coverage, but it’s possible that I bought the car and a packet of Sea Monkeys outright.  We’ll know for sure when the charge hits our credit card.]

I’m no stranger to shitty traffic, being a former Boston/New York/CT driver and all, but the traffic out of Paris was straight up horrendous.  A crawl would have been faster than our top speed, and to top it off Paris scooter drivers are plain f**king crazy – zooming in and out of lanes and playing pinball with sideview mirrors.

We got a little bit of entertainment when a convertible drove by us with a 20-something French dude standing up and waving to everyone wearing only a 1-piece stringkini.  There are worse ways to entertain yourself in traffic, I suppose.

It took us about 2 1/2 hours to get to Caen, our next base, and we got checked into our next apartment.   We chose Caen for its proximity to the D-Day beaches, not for its beauty, and the town was pretty much what we expected.

Shortly after the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944 Caen was the scene of some vicious fighting, and 90% of the town was destroyed.  The result, as my wife pointed out, is that Caen now resembles Boca Raton.

But our apartment was clean and comfy and we slept well.  The next day we rose early and headed to nearby Bayeux for a tour of some D-Day sites with Bayeux Shuttle Tours.

We got to Bayeux a bit early, checked in for our tour and had a look around.  Bayeux is everything that Caen is not.  It’s a beautiful, charming, and wonderfully picturesque town.  We didn’t have much time to explore, however, as our tour began at 9 am.  Our guide, John, an English expat, swept us aboard a tidy little bus with six other Americans and we headed for Pointe du Hoc.

I should say that I don’t consider myself to be a history buff.  I read up on WWII when I was a teenager like a lot of kids do, but I haven’t read much since or seen many films about it.

When we decided to make Paris the first stop of our travels, I figured that we should probably check out the beaches of Normandy, well, just because.

It’s Normandy, for crying out loud.  A lot of shit went down there, so we should probably see it while we’re in France, right?

Juliann knew about as much about D-Day as I did, so to get a little color I decided we should watch Saving Private Ryan about a week before going.  I had forgotten how powerful that film is, and I know we could have probably done better, but it definitely set us in the right frame of mind.

I’m also not big on romanticizing the military.  I usually keep my opinions on that topic to myself, as they tend to be rather unpopular.  But it’s an important thing to keep in mind for the rest of this post.

Pointe du Hoc, for those of you who don’t know (I didn’t) is the spot between the Omaha and Utah beaches where 225 U.S. Rangers landed in the early hours of June 6, 1944.  Their objective was to knock out German gun batteries that could have threatened the success of the invasion, and to do this they had to scale 90-foot cliffs in the face of withering German fire.

The Rangers suffered heavy casualties but accomplished their mission, which on paper could have generously been called insane.

I stood on the edge of those cliffs and imagined scores of Germans raining down bullets and grenades on the Rangers.  “Hero” is a word used far, far too often today, but those Rangers were definitely heroes.

It made me feel proud and sad and hollow all at the same time.

Our guide John gave us some good background information on what happened at Pointe du Hoc and then he cut us loose to look around.  I had heard about the horrors of Verdun in WWI and had wanted to visit that town on our tour through France, but it looks like we’re not going to be able to make it happen.  Pointe du Hoc, though, gave me a glimpse of what I wanted to see in Verdun.

What was most impressive was the landscape:  American bombers hit Pointe du Hoc so hard that even today, 70 years later, it looks like the magnified surface of a mossy golf ball.  There are shell and bomb craters everywhere, many as deep as 20 feet.

After Pointe du Hoc we headed to Omaha Beach.  We were prepared for it, so we weren’t surprised when we saw it was a very ordinary, almost “towny” sort of beach.  It reminded me a little bit of beaches I’ve visited on the South Shore of Massachusetts (aka “the South Showah”) excepting the stone and timber houses.

There wasn’t much to see at Omaha other than some gun batteries lodged in the hills, one of which has been converted into a monument to the U.S. National Guard.  There’s also a remnant of the mulberry, the man-made harbor built by the Allies in June of 1944 to bring ashore the enormous quantities of troops and supplies they would need to liberate France and take back the Continent from the Nazis.

It was sufficient, though, to stare out at the beach and imagine what it must have been like to be on board one of those transports one Tuesday morning 72 years ago.

After a little time on the beach we hopped back in the van and headed for our final stop, the American Cemetery at Normandy.  John talked to us a bit about the cemetery, took us in, and let us look around.

It was a simultaneously beautiful and crushing place.  Nearly 10,000 men and women now rest there, and it doesn’t seem right to say that chiseled stone and alabaster crosses and stars can give some measure of meaning to their sacrifice, but somehow they do.

We had precious little time to spend at the cemetery, and we soon had to board the bus back to Bayeux.  We rode through the beautiful Normandy countryside  in silence.

We arrived in Bayeux, did a little exploring, got some lunch, and then returned to our digs in Caen for the night.

Friday we had breakfast, packed our bags, cleared out of our apartment in Caen, and then stopped by the Memorial “Peace” Museum of Caen for what we thought would be a short visit.

We ended up staying over 3 hours.  It was a wonderfully informative journey through the events that drove, and finally ended, WWII.  I highly recommend it.

We left the museum, grabbed some lunch in a quiet, hardscrabble part of Caen, and then headed west to St. Aubin de Terregatte, the location of our next lodgings.  St. Aubin is about 30 minutes from Mont Saint Michel, and we wanted to use it as a base to explore the famous island abbey.

Our apartment in St. Aubin is small but delightfully homey, and our hosts, Steve and Clare, are extremely sweet people.  They’re Scottish, so I’m finding all sorts of excuses to ask them questions just so I can hear them talk.

We’re out in the middle of French farm country here and it’s beautiful.  We’ll be driving along a tiny, dusty road between a corn field and an apple orchard and suddenly a small town of ancient stone houses will appear out of nowhere, crouching over the road as we wend our way through.

Saturday we’re visiting Mont Saint Michel and Sunday we head back to Paris to turn in our rental car to hop a train to Annecy, where we’ll be for 2 weeks.

A bientot!