The D-Day Beaches of Normandy

This past Monday I went with my mom and aunt to see the D-Day beaches in Normandy. This was my first trip out of Paris (other than my weekend in London back at the end of August), and it was lovely to get out of the city for a day! We started very early, leaving at 6 a.m. to get to the Gare de Saint-Lazare for a 7:07 train. This part of Normandy is just over two hours away by train normally, but because of a huge storm that hit this part of Europe on Sunday night, there were some interruptions in the transportation system, and we ended up only making it as far as Caen, which is about 15 minutes east of the town of Bayeux where we had wanted to start. This was remedied easily enough by a phone call to the taxi company we'd hired to drive us around to the various sites over the course of the day, and our driver came to Caen to get us. We drove about 40 minutes through lovely countryside to our first stop at Utah Beach.

There's a nice museum at Utah Beach that offers a great 17-minute film about D-Day and a nice array of military stuff from the events. I'll leave it to you to do some research about the various beaches - this was the only one we visited as such. From here we drove to Pointe du Hoc, which was the site of a lot of German bunkers that were so thoroughly bombed by the Allies that there are still sizable holes in the ground.

(Note: this was the first summer in my entire life in which I did not see the ocean once. As such, I greatly enjoyed this opportunity to see the coast, and I took a lot of pictures of it. The Normandy coast is gorgeous, and there were tons of rainbows that day!)

From Pointe du Hoc we drove along Omaha Beach. I guess if you had to identify "the" D-Day beach would probably be the winner; it had the highest number of casualties - over 3,000. We didn't stop or walk around, but we got to drive right next to the beach, and that allowed for sufficient reflection. It must be weird for the people who live in houses right across from the beach. Here's Omaha Beach:

Our final stop was the American Cemetery, which is technically American territory (just like American embassies). I have to admit I enjoyed the switch to signs in English. :) There's a nice visitor center with some videos that feature a few of the men who died on D-Day, and then there's the cemetery itself, which is obviously sobering but very lovely. I don't think these brave men could have wished for graves with a more beautiful view - the cemetery looks out over Omaha Beach; the picture above is actually from the the cemetery.

Seeing all of this made me feel pleasantly proud to be American. I'm not a fan of many things that my country has done in recent years, but we have much to be proud of in our earlier history.

I really enjoyed reading an excerpt from a letter written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (the author of Le Petit Prince) to American soldiers. He wrote that although France and the United States might one day disagree on issues, he (and his countrymen) would/should always be grateful to the United States for its assumption of responsibility for the liberty of people an entire ocean away. Apparently the people in Normandy remain grateful to this day.