Wednesday Duh and DDay Thursday

I am basically going to skip Thursday as we did very little, well, I probably should say I did very little. Some laundry and that kind of stuff. Carroll and Shirley went to a different farmer's market, I stayed in the digs as my knee was sore. Wednesday afternoon Shirley's friends Nans, Amira and their 10 month old baby stopped in for a couple of hours. Shirley had dealings with Nans on a previous rental. They are really nice people. But, they are moving to Tunisia (she is

from there) to live there for a while. It will be a big change for them as right now they live in a small apartment with the baby and a dog. I hope it goes well. They are probably going to be in Oregon next summer, that would be great.

THURSDAY

Would you believe 4:30am wake up to get to the train station by 7:00am for the ride to Caen. It was dark, streets were quite, subways were not very crowded (my kind of subway)and we got to the St. Lazre train station..big damn place with about 100 rail lines, subway tubes and buses all arriving. We had to wait for about a half hour but got to our assigned car and seats.

The train is "high speed" but not one of those 200mph jobs. I'm guessing we may have hit 100 mph once or twice but it took us about

2 hours to go the 125 miles to Caen without any stops. We meet up with our guide Mario. He gives us the details and our first stop is the Normandy Peace Museum which covers both World Wars. It was interesting, a little crowded, but there were a lot of facts thrown at us.
What a mess war is..it brings out the worst.

Our first stop after the museum is upstairs for lunch. The three of us all have duck, that comes with potatoes and carrots followed by a dessert of apple tart with rice pudding at the museum. It's not too bad.

We pile in the van (there are a total of seven us.....the three of us, a couple from San Francisco, and a couple from some place in Nevada) and head to our first stop, Pointe-du-Hoc. This is where the Rangers had to scale a 100 foot cliff. It was a little hard to photograph as we were, obviously, on top of the ridge and you could not get the right

perspective . It was an amazing feat and exhibition of courage and determination. The Rangers started out with just over 200 men and lost over half in the first few hours of their ultimately successful attempt.

We moved on down the coastline and stopped at Omaha Beach. This is where the opening scenes of "Saving Private Ryan" were suppose to take place. They did a good job in the scene selection because the film depicting Omaha Beach looks quite like the original. There are two monuments honoring all the casualties. In the first day of the battle 3,000 civilians were killed and in the approximately 100 days it took for the Normandy invasion and battle, 20,000 additional civilians were eliminated, primarily by the Allied bombing raids.

From Omaha we moved over to Gold Beach where an artificial harbor was built using old ships and custom made floating portions of

hollow concrete towed here from England where they were constructed. There are still about thirty portions visible when the tide is low enough. Three million tons of supplies were offloaded in this artificial harbor over the course of three months. After one hundred days the entire operation was abandoned due to the fact they were able to construct more direct supply lines.

We now go to the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer where 9,387 soldiers are buried. There are also another 4,400 buried in a cemetery at Saint-James. It is a humbling, not pleasant experience. To see row after row of crosses, all the same, in perfectly straight lines. The grounds are immaculate, well maintained and there is a crew of 25 people mowing undoing all the other things necessary. The pictures do not do it justice.

We finish our tour and head back to Caen. We have over an hour wait before the train arrives, so we consume a few adult beverages in a bar near the train station. The ride back to Paris and the subway ride to the flat are uneventful. A very long day, got up at 4:30am and got back at 11:30 pm. But a day I will remember. 6.6 miles 15373 steps