Saturday, June 21, 2014

Drove back to Bayeux this morning and started the day by going shopping at the Saturday market as recommended by “Johnny”.

Our Health Department would have a field day!!!!

 Linda did a little Christmas shopping and Bill found some outrageous bread for about 10E. We then walked the town a bit and settled on a place for brunch.

Since it was lunchtime after all, we had the obligatory glass of wine, then Linda had Fish and chips, and Bill enjoyed “Crepes Normand”. We shared some more crepes filled with Nutella for “desert”, had one more glass of wine (coffee for Linda) and we took off touring the town some more.

One thing we decided was we could not leave without seeing was the 1000 year old Norman Tapestry known as the Tapestry of Bayeux (google it, I will not even try to do it justice with a description here).

We then proceeded from Bayeux to Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery. No pictures and certainly no words can do the cemetery justice.

It is a place to visit and to remember, and to give thanks. We were fortunate enough to arrive just as a choir group from Pennsylvania was placing flowers on the monument. About thirty of them, mostly teenage girls, all dressed in black, each placing a single flower, on by one, many crying as they did so. They were in the company of a group of Royal Marines and, after placing the flowers they assembled in front of the monument, the Marines assemble facing them, and the choir sang a song of thanks to the soldiers. After the song was completed, the groups applauded each other and then the choir director asked her group if they had done all they had come to do. After only a brief hesitation, the choir group broke ranks and ran to the soldiers and began exchanging tearful hugs all around thanking them for their service. This went on until each soldier had been hugged by every member of the choir.

It was said by Winston Churchill about a different time and place, but it is just as true about the men who landed on the beaches on D Day, “Never before have so many owed so much to so few”

After leaving the American Cemetery, we drove to the only remaining German Battery. 

Unfortunately, I dropped my camera while getting out of the car and broke the lens I bought especially for this trip.

 It was working wonderfully and had replace all of my other lenses (which I deliberately did not bring), so on Monday the first order of the day is to repair or replace it.

After the visit to the German gun emplacements, we hemmed and hawed about where to have dinner and finally decided to head back to Granville so we would have only a short drive home after dinner. However, someone had neglected to warn us that Granville was having a music festival starting today and when I tell you that between the people and the cars, there was not a square inch left in town, I am only exaggerating a little. We got trapped in traffic and it took us a couple of hours to find our way back out of town. Tom Tom kept taking us in circles!!! Later when we looked at a map of are we found we were on a peninsula with only one way out!!!

Having dinner, in fact even parking the car was a complete impossibility. Linda made spaghetti at home.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Today we decided to take a day off from vacationing, do some laundry, and finally catch up on this Blog so we can publish it.]

Thankfully we did not have to do laundry at the drive up!!!!!!!

I did manage to fill up my wallet at the ATM, gas up the car and even wash it, so we are off to a fresh start tomorrow and are headed back to the D Day beaches again. There is still much more to see and do there.