NORMANDY, FRANCE

August 24, Friday

The Leger Holidays tour bus left Bury St. Edmunds at 9:00 a.m. Syd picked us up somewhat earlier than that and dropped us at the station. We rode three hours to Dover. Then we stood around for an hour at the docks as our luggage was transferred from the feeder coaches to the tour coaches.

When we finally got on the coach we'd be spending the next four days on, we were directed to seats one and two. Hooray for Syd! The tour was on!

We could not find a D-Day Beaches tour from anywhere from the U.S. or on the net from England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales. I take the Bury St. Edmunds online newspaper. I emailed the travel agents listed in the paper, and none of them had such a tour. We had been trying for about four years to get this tour. I signed us up for two of them in 2003, and both got cancelled.

Bob really, really wanted to get to the D-Day Beaches. So Syd went to work, and found a tour! He signed us up, and selected seats one and two for us on the bus. Those were right in the very front of the bus with a view on all sides. Not only that, but the front seats had a little table in front of them with wells for cups. Sheer luxury. None of the other seats had that.

We drove onto the ferry, got off the bus, and went upstairs. I got some good shots of the white cliffs of Dover as we sailed out. Knowing we'd have a four-hour bus ride from Calais to our hotel in Caen, we not only bought lunch on the ferry, but also sandwiches for supper on the bus. Bob even found two little individual bottles of wine for £1.60 each.

The actual time on the water was an hour and a half. Add to that a half- hour on either end getting on and off the ferry. When we left the docks at Calais the tour director Mike introduced himself and the two drivers, Kevin and a relief driver. Then there was the four-hour bus ride. I took pictures of road signs to Paris and Amiens to prove we were in France.

We arrived at the Clarine Hotel in Caen at 10:30 p.m. French time. Our room was on the ground floor just off the lobby. Nice location.

August 25, Saturday

We were up at seven in the morning for an eight-thirty departure. The breakfast was buffet, a really nice buffet. There were French pastries like little croissants filled with chocolate and puff pastries with fruit in them. That's where I stopped in the buffet line. I filled my plate from the pastry baskets. Well, I did get some fresh fruit for my health. But pastries are my passion. How many times will I ever get to have French pastries in France? Forget the eggs and yogurt.

The bus, like many tours, soon became a moving social hour. Kevin the driver was funny, and we were close enough to hear his quips. He drove for a couple of hours, then Nigel took over. Nigel was very young looking, perhaps in his early twenties. Someone told Bob he was actually a mechanic who had been drafted to drive for this trip. Well, he was an excellent driver, too. Mike, the tour guide, ran him down narrow village lanes and into tight spots that he handled with no problem. Mike came to France often to explore these D-Day sites, and was able to show us places from D-Day not on the regular tour route.

Mike was also an expert with people as well as being an expert on military history. He teased and joshed the passengers. His delivery of the information was in a relaxed manner, but he often spent time sitting on the aisle step in front poring over a notebook gathering his facts.

Just in front of our seat was a large cooler full of drinks. We could buy soda, beer, or hot tea or snacks along the road. That was really great. I read the little menu in the pocket in front of our seats. It listed the various soft drinks, tea, snacks, and Stella. What was Stella? After a while I found out it was Stella Artois, the beer. Stella Artois is the Bud Light of Britain. The driver not at the wheel sold the drinks and snacks on demand.

The code name for the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944, was Operation Overlord. I notice as we drove along there were small signs that read simply, “Operation Overlord.” This was apparently a tour route to take in order to visit D-Day sites.

Our first stop was at Pegasus Bridge on the Caen Canal. Six British gliders carrying troops were let loose over Normandy in the black night before D-Day to land near and take the bridge. This was to prevent German armored vehicles from interfering with the landing on Sword Beach. Five of the gliders made the landing and the bridge was secured. The sixth landed seven miles away behind German lines, but the men were able to get back and rejoin the British forces.

The house of the family Gondrée, next to the canal, then became the first house liberated in France. There is now a café in the front of the house, run by a Gondrée daughter. She was a small child the night of the attack.

First Mike took us across the bridge to the place, now marked with a plaque, where the five gliders landed. It was a miracle that those gliders, in complete darkness, with minimal navigation aids and no motors for correction, were able to land on target. Gliders were used, of course, because they were silent. The troops swarmed the Germans on the bridge in complete surprise, and easily took it.

Then we walked back across the bridge to Café Gondrée. There were a number of souvenirs for sale inside. Bob bought some. The lady behind the counter was happy to talk to people about the liberation. She must have told her story a million times in her life, but talked freely in English to folks off our bus who asked her questions.

We went from there to nearby Ranville Cemetery. Most of the men buried there are British, but we found some Canadian headstones, and there were some Germans. The German parents wept for their sons as did the British parents. We who saw those rows of white headstones wept for all of them.

Sword Beach, landed by the British, was our next stop. We had a mission at Sword Beach. Lionel in Tostock, who is retired American military, was given a plaque with vials of sand on it from all the Normandy D-Day Beaches. The Sword Beach vial had come open and spilled its sand. Our mission was to bring back sand from Sword Beach to complete that plaque. So the first thing I did was to scoop up a handful of sand and dump it in a plastic sandwich bag Lionel had sent along with us.

The beach was filled with holiday folk this warm sunny day. It was hard to imagine the horror and carnage of fifty-three years ago. Rows of tractors were parked on the beach. Every now and then one would roll out and chug down to the water to retrieve a boat. Boats were also launched right off the beach by tractors. There was no need for fancy launching slips. The tractors just shoved the trailers into the sea.

We rode by Juno Beach, the Canadian front, but didn't get out. Mike gave us the description of the battle as we passed the beach. Gold Beach was, like Sword, a British front. It was a wide assault area that included the town of Arromanches, where we stopped for lunch.

Arromanches is on the sea. It's a resort town of beaches, hotels, restaurants, and tourists. The bus door opened and we were on our own. Bob and I walked along the beachfront street for a while, then turned into a hotel outdoor brasserie with glass walls. The walls kept out the breeze, and we sat in full warm sun.

Bob ordered moules à la crème Normande, Normandy mussels in cream. Mussels in cream are practically the national dish of Normandy, which is famous for its cream, butter, and cheeses. He was served a bucket of mussels swimming in a rich buttery cream sauce. Bob said the sauce wasn't thickened. It seemed to be just cream, butter, onions, and celery, and was absolutely delicious.

I had a salad and a glass of wine, so was finished long before he could pick all those mussels from their shells. While he wallowed in his mussels, I went out to find us some wine. Marian Rutland, who often goes to France, said we just must have some Bordeaux while we were there.

I found a little wine, sandwich, and ice cream shop just across the street from the brasserie. I went in and stared at their shelves of wine. A young lady came over to help me. She asked me what I wanted. I hadn't a clue, but I didn't want her to know that. I didn't want to be so naïve as to say, “My friend told me to buy Bordeaux.” Bordeaux is a place. There are many kinds of Bordeaux wines. I did know that much.

But this gal was wise to the ways of selling. Her next question was what I wanted the wine for. Her English was limited, so I simply said, “to have in the evening, with cheese.”

Ah! She pulled out two bottles and showed them to me. They were Bordeaux! I started to choose the cheaper one, but she pointed out that the slightly more costly one was bottled at the château. Well, that had to be better. I don't know where they bottle the rest, maybe in someone's basement. So I bought the Château Lamothe Bordeaux, bottled at the château. It said so right on the label, “mis en bouteille au château.”

I went back and collected Bob from behind his pile of mussle shells, and we made it to the bus in plenty of time.

Arromanche was the site of the famous Mulberry Harbor. It was impossible to bring supply crafts in close to the beaches, yet the attacking force needed vehicles, food, medicine, and weapons. So large prefabricated caissons were made in Britain and towed across the channel, at five miles an hour, to Gold Beach. Anchored to the ocean floor, they were breakwaters, piers, and roadways to offload personnel and supplies for the war effort.

After lunch we went to a museum in Arromanches dedicated to the Mulberry Harbor. It was an amazing feat of engineering. Pieces of the harbor still lie offshore and on the beach at Arromanches.

We climbed on the bus and traveled to a German gun battery at Longues sur Mer. This battery was featured in the film, The Longest Day. It was a long walk from the car park to the battery. Cornfields lined the path. They were verged by poppies and lacy white wildflowers. I took pictures.

There were a series of bunkers at the battery. Most of them were empty, though one had a gun in it. Mike did an excellent job preparing us before every stop. When we went our individual ways at the sites, we know what we were seeing. Again, it was difficult to perceive that these gun emplacements, sitting in a cornfield back from the beach, could fire on ships twenty-five kilometers out at sea.

Our last, and most poignant, stop was at the Bayeux war cemetery. Over 4,000 men and women from the British Commonwealth are buried there. There were two men traveling together on our bus, older men, our age. I did overhear that they were from a British Legion club somewhere in England. What I didn't know is that they made the trip particularly to lay a wreath in tribute at Bayeux Cemetery. Mike had tipped us off that there would be something special, so we from the bus all gathered at the memorial wall at four o'clock. The inscription on the memorial read, “Their name liveth for evermore.”

The two men had replaced their felt Indiana Jones hats with the berets of their units. In a brief moving ceremony, they laid a wreath of poppies they had carried with them from England on the step of the memorial wall. Other poppy wreaths lay there, given by families and organizations in memory of those who died in that war. I photographed the wreath afterwards. It read, “Dunscroft, Hatfield, and Stainforth Branch of the Royal British Legion.”

Back at the hotel, we couldn't unlock the door to our room. Bob went to the desk. A sub-manager or something came and tried to unlock the door. He couldn't unlock it. He was nervous and frustrated and kept running back to the front desk for keys. We weren't nervous. We were tired. We just stood in the hall like zombies and waited for things to happen. Just about when he was going to call a custodian to take off the hinges, the lock clicked and the door opened.

The key worked fine from then on.

At supper in the dining room of the hotel, I had a language/cultural difficulty. I didn't understand the wording on the menu about the buffet choices. There were three different buffets listed on the menu. The waiter, with his limited English, didn't understand what I didn't understand. I couldn't make him understand my problem with my ten words of French. So I gave up and just ordered a Salade de Clarine. Bob had no difficulty. He just said “buffet” and pigged out on everything, whether he was supposed to or not.