Viva la the rest of France

Practising an assault on the bunker, go Rob you can do it.
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Part 2...

We survived the maniac drivers in Paris and made it to Normandy (Normandie in French) and what a revelation it has been. The traffic out of Paris was a crawl for about two hours. Once we got out we realized why the French do not like to change anything. The countryside is breathtakingly beautiful.

We took a detor on our way here to Chartres (pronounced Chartr). It is home to a magnificent, brooding and very impressive gothic cathedral. The vaulted roof is about twelve stories high and has acres of ancient stained glass windows dating from around 1100. In those days there were no books for common folk and they used the stained glass to teach the stories from the bible to lay people who could not read latin.The 'old' cathedral which had been there for about two hundred years burnt down in a fire and they decided to build an even bigger new one. It is home to the veil of Mary (the garment that she supposedly wore when she gave birth to Jesus). It is not often that you get a guided tour by the guy who writes most of the books on a place, well, that is exactly what we got. An Englishman named Malcolm Miller has studied this place for the past 40 years and still gives guided tours. Needless to say we were impressed. The sheer faith of the people at that time to undertake something of this magnitude a thousand years ago is unfathomable. As Napoleon once said "this is no place for an atheist".

She even learnt how to park from the French, right on the pavement.
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Then we asked Jill to guide us to Bayeux, which she did with no sweat. I am not so sure about her pronunciation of all the French names though. The countryside got prettier with Norman cows grazing the fields. On the way, we decided to stop at a huge supermarket just off the highway called Cora to mix with some regular French people (not the snooty Parisians) and check out their cafeteria for a quick dinner. At eight thirty on a Friday night that cafeteria was mobbed, the line was about ten minutes. We figured either the food was so good or there was nowhere else to go on a Friday night. As neither of us know a lick of French we resorted to pointing at what we wanted. The cheese seems to be a big deal around here, everyone took a wedge of some sort or another on their plate. The food was ordinary but the people were a lot more friendly.

Endless rows.......
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Before nightfall we made it to Bayeux. This is a small town in Normandy with a long history. Our home for the next two days is a delightful little B&B run by the friendliest French person we have met so far (apart from Sev, of course). There is a courtyard to park our car, three little yorkshire terriers that are unabashedly cute (even for non dog lover like me), free breakfast and free wi-fi. Nirvana!!!

Today was World War II day for us. We drove through some incredibly narrow roads, even for someone who has driven in rural India, some of the roads were unbelievable. They were not as big as Ginny's driveway in CT and it was a two way road. We did it make it unscathed to all the places we wanted to see.

A view of Omaha beach from the cemetery. Saving Private Ryan was shot here too.
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There is a museum around here it seems for practically every day of the second world war. We decided to see the one about the floating port that was built by the British to supply the invasion. Very smart how they did it. Then we hustled on down the windy coastal road to see some of the remaining German artillery placements. Wonder how many German tourists they see around here. Must be weird for them.

Stopped at a tiny village and got a picnic lunch together. Baguettes from the bakery, smoked ham from the butcher, two types of cheese (one of which turned out to be butter in fancy packaging) and our new favorite drink, cider. All of that including a couple of large bottle of evian cost us around 10 euros. In Paris that would have cost me a tank of gas at todays prices.

A field of bomb craters
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Then we followed the signs to the American cemetery at Omaha beach. Here we are, braving the narrow French road along the coast, with old houses and shops and we turn the corner to enter the cemetery and viola a wide, flat, straight road. Just like Anywhere, America...... A football field sized parking lot, modern spacious toilets, even mulch around the trees on the parking lot. Uncle Sam knows how to do it in style.

Never the less, it is a wonderful, very very thoughtful and incredibly moving place. There is a small museum with videos of men who narrate how it felt being on a boat on D day. Heart wrenching stuff. Then you walk out into a very poignant memorial with water lilies and walls with the names of the dead on it. It took us a while to realize that these were the names of the 1500 missing in action, not the dead. When you see the actual cemetery your heart just stops. There, high up on the cliff overlooking the very beach that they fought to capture are about ten thousand graves. Endless rows of identical headstones stretch out as far as one can see. I mean, all these people died!!!! some of them nineteen years old, had no say in what they were going to do with their life. Fighting a foreign enemy in an even more foreign land. Thank god we won. This is just incredible, almost life changing stuff. Seeing headstones that said "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to god" almost moved me to tears.

She did an admirable job around these twisty roads
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We spent so much time there, we forgot all about our picnic lunch in the car and things such as hunger seemed insignificant for a while. Then we proceeded to our last stop called Point do Hoc. This was a large German artillery installation on a tall cliff that was considered so important that a company of crack commandos were sent a day ahead of the actual invasion to scale the cliffs and take down the guns. Their courage was no doubt incredible but even more incredible is the size of the craters from the bombs that the Allied dropped around the bunkers. It blew my mind away. You could build a regular French house in one of them. It must of have been hell on earth for those poor German soldiers feeling the ground shaking with these bombs. War is unimaginable horror.

German built stuff, good engineering.
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Tonight is a big fireworks night here, we have not figured out why, but it is a long weekend here. We decided not to head out to see them and call it a night. Tomorrow we are back on the road heading down south about 400 miles. We have not quite decided what to see along the way.