Normandy

Anyone who knows me knows I have been fascinated with war stuff since I was about 10. That being said, I'm known to dork out pretty hard on WW2 and D-Day stuff (Band of Brothers anyone?), so bear with me on this post. This week we decided to drive out to the Normand coast to do some WWII sightseeing. We rented a car for our journey, check out this sweet ride I got!

Picked the color out myself

As small as the car seems, there was sufficient headroom for me, so I was happy. The first night we didn't have any hotel reservations and figured we would just wing it. However, we knew that we wanted to see Mont St. Michel the first day, so we headed in that direction. We saw this little hilltop town called Avranches and decided to look for a hotel or B&B there. As luck would have it, the first hotel we went to had one open room left, and for cheap, so I booked it. I immediately became grateful that we had the car because it allowed us the freedom to check out small country towns not on the main D-Day route. We went to this medieval town named Dinan. It is one of the best preserved medieval towns in Europe, and we were able to walk along an 11th Century castle wall and watchtower that used to guard this French town from the English. It was pretty surreal, check out these pictures to get a better idea.

One of the town square areas

Sarah and I on a cobblestone residential street. People still live in these homes.

Picture of the Medieval Castles wall that still surrounds the downtown area

Picture from the wall of one of the watchtowers that overlooked the river

After Dinan, we went to Mont St. Michel, an island type place that looks like something out of a Disney book, built in the 8th century. It was very nice from afar, but its narrow streets were so packed side to side with tourists, it kind of killed the ambiance.

Sarah and I outside Mont St. Michel

The next day we began the drive to Caen, where there is a WWII museum that chronicles D-Day in depth and the events leading up to the war (the best in the world). On the way to Caen we decided to stop in many small towns, almost all of which had some sort of memorial to soldiers or civilians from that town that were killed in the war. We came across this monument, and upon getting out to look at it, realized it was originally a World War 1 monument which had added to it WW2 victims.

Original WW1 monument that had been turned into a WW2 monument as well

You can see that a lot of fighting happened in this town as the monument was riddled with bullet holes.

What was also really interesting was that you would see really old stone houses right next to new modern ones, something you don't see a lot of in the French Countryside (most of the homes are older). We later learned that the modern homes were replacements of homes that had been destroyed in WW2. The homes next to this particular monument were almost all newer homes.

We got to Caen around 3, checked into our hotel, and went straight to the museum. I am not a huge museum buff, but if you are ever in Normandy, this museum is worth a full days visit. We arrived at around 4 and left at 7 when the museum closed only to return the next day at 11 to finish seeing the museum before our bus tour of the landing beaches in the afternoon. The museum went in depth not only about D-Day, but the whole war. Upon reading the information about the battle of Normandy, we found out that the town we were in with the memorial that had bullet holes in it was one where heavy German resistance occurred.

The tour of the beaches was great, but also kind of weird. We started out at Pont du Hoc, where the Rangers landed between Utah and Omaha sector to scale 90 foot cliffs so that could take out heavy German artillery. This was my favorite visit because it was all original and preserved. There were bomb craters everywhere, German bunkers, and trenches still intact.

Picture of a bomb crater with a German bunker in the background

Sarah even had a little fun

Next, we saw one of the American sectors, Omaha Beach, nicknamed "Bloody Omaha", where heaviest fighting occurred. Nothing has been preserved here, except you could see the cut outs in the cliffs where the Germans had their machine guns set up. It was surreal to stand at the oceans and look up at the bluff, but it was also weird because there were little kids playing in the water where this battle took place. After Omaha we went to the American Cemetery where we saw the wall of the missing and the graves of nearly 10,000 American soldiers, including Roosevelt's oldest son (see picture below). The site was huge and very well kept, but again there were so many tourists it was hard to appreciate. After that we went and saw Arromanches, which is the floating harbor that was floated over from England for the Allies to unload supplies for the effort.

Roosevelt JR grave at the Cemetery. Great story behind him. He was an American businessman and political leader who fought in both WW1 and WW2. He had arthritis so bad he used a walking cane, but still personally requested to join the first waves of troops on D-Day at Utah Beach. He landed, and was able to redirect his men and advance, but later died of a heart attack on July 12th.

All in all the tours were great, but the museum was by far the best. Caen itself was not a very good town to stay in. 80% of the town was wrecked by Allied bombing, therefore most of it is pretty new and it doesn't feel much like an old French town. Normandy, however, is one of the most beautiful and peaceful countrysides I have ever seen, which makes it hard to imagine that the largest military invasion in history took place there.