Bayeux/Normandy Beaches

Because we didn't have to travel as far today, it wasn't that big of a deal that we were not out early again this morning. We still woke up, got ready, went to the market and did all that jazz by the same time that we did the day before. We bought a lot more of those silly salami sticks though because we loved them so much.

Our first stop of the day was to the town of Bayeux, which is about 20-30 minutes away from Caen. It is a cute little French town that houses the Bayeux Tapestry. This tapestry, which is over one thousand years old, tells the story of the Norman invasion of England and the events leading up to it. This thing is pretty epic. It's like 70 meters long or something like that. The price of admission to see it included the little audio guide so that it could walk you through the story of the tapestry. This audio guide was more stressful than the one I had the day before though. It would rush you through 4 or 5 frmaes of the story at once and then make you pause for like 5 minutes so that they could play really silly music. Other than that, it was pretty cool. They even sold do it yourself tapestry dealies in the gift store. I don't think it was for the whole tapesty, that would have been ridic., but you could do small parts of it and display it in your home. How fun.

Anyway, there was another little part of the museum that you could visit after you saw the actual tapestry, but I didn't find it as interesting as I found the tapestry itself. There were some cool artifacts (like authentic chain mail), but other than that they just had little mannequins in poses really.

After leaving the museum, we walked around the town a little more. We grabbed postcards before we saw the tapestry, so we had to find stamps to send them out with. The first tobacco shop we went to kind of yelled at us as if we were offending them, so we almost gave up. On the way back to the car, Oppa took Mia and me to see the Bayeux Cathedral. We found another tobacco shop in the area that did sell stamps, so that part was settled. The cathedral itself was very nice. It wasn't too big compared to some of the other cathedrals that I've seen on this trip, but it was still very nice. Also, it looked like one of the gargoyles on the facade was an angry nun-like person. Maybe that was just my imagination. We met up with everyone else and loaded back into the car. After circling around for a little bit, we drove off to our next destination.

The next stop was Omaha Beach, which is where the American cemetery and memorial for the D-Day landing is located. It was about a 20 minute drive out of Bayeux. The drive also included passing by a lot of cows. There are a lot of cows in Normandy and they are all very perfectly spotted (or all white).

Anyway, we parked outside of the cemetery and memorial and walked inside. The area was very pretty and very nice. The cemetery itself was sad, though. Oppa, James, Gianni, Mia, and I all walked down to the beach itself. I think Oppa was expecting to see some stuff from WWII in the area because he saw it when he went there ten years before, but there really wasn't anything in the area that we were at except for beach. We climbed back up and met Umma and Halmony again and then walked through the cemetery to look at the main memorial.

On the way out, we also visited the museum that they had set up at the entrance. It was nice. I think it was like a year or two old because everything about the museum seemed new. But pretty much it was memorializing the Americans who died at D-Day and gave short biographies about some of their lives as well as background on the event itself. I really liked the set up.

We left the area to find another museum that Oppa had found an advertisement for either in Bayeux or at the hotel or somewhere. This one had a lot of guns and items that were used by people during the war and kind of told the story of the French experience of it, or that's what I got out of the museum at least. It wasn't too big and there wasn't too much to the museum though, so we kind of breezed through it and left shortly after.

We weren't really sure what else to do at this point. We were kind of hungry by this time since we hadn't really eaten since breakfast (with the exception of those sausage sticks that we had been poking at throughout the day). We ended up stopping at this little fishing town to eat. I don't remember what the name of the town was, but it was very cute. We just got food from some small sandwich shop and Umma was disgusted with the fry sandwich that Gianni got. It was literally just a baguette with fries in it. She clearly had not eaten with us on our backpacking trip to have experienced the constant fries, the hamburger sandwich with fries in it, the American pizza, etc. I had a nutella crepe for dessert, so I was very happy. I also managed to finish my book while Umma and Mia ran around looking for a place to eat.

We left the town after we ate and then went to another town to look at the mulberries. On the way, we stopped at some other little place to look at the batteries, which I guess held a lot of the guns and tanks and stuff. I'm not exactly sure because I don't remember all of Oppa's explanations. It was a fun little stop though (and a good bathroom break). We could climb on top of them and look inside and stuff. It was cool. I think Gianni got cut on the back by one of the rusty old guns, which caused a bit of a panic.

Anyway, we eventually got to the town with the mulberries. That's apparently the code name that they used for what Oppa described as cement-ish boats that the Allies blew up to form temporary ports and docks in preparation for the Normandy invasion. You could see a lot of them from the town we were at, which was cool. If had time for beach stuff or were into that at all, I wondered if you could swim out to some of the closer ones and climb on them, but since we didn't pack our swim suits and did not have time to swim, we wouldn't find out.

We drove back towards Caen and were going to look around the city itself, but got slightly lost while doing so and ended up deciding against it. Our hotel was on the outskirts on the town, so we hadn't really seen much of it. Anyway, we got back to the hotel around 8, while there was still a lot of daylight outside and while there were still actually parking spots in the parking lot.

Once we got back, we all took turns on Oppa's computer. I blogged for a while and tried some of Oppa's apple alcohol (very strong, btw). After I was done with that, I went back to the girls' room and read the new Dave Gorman book while watching Lost in French.