An Excursion to the D-Day Landing Beaches

Friday, April 18

We went on a bus excursion to check out the D-Day Landing Beaches today.  Long day sitting on a bus but there were some nice things overall.

There was some slowness getting all the people separated and pointed in the right direction, Martha and I just shook our heads at the stupidity of people when they refused to listen to instructions.

The tour we were on would cover the beaches but mostly from a distant viewing of the ones attacked by the British forces.  We did get out of the bus and walked around a bit at a couple of spots:

In the city of Arromanches, FR.   We tried to tour the Landing Museum which featured info on the Mulberry floating concrete structures used by the Allies to rapidly create breakwaters for hasty harbors.

The museum however proved horribly small and crowded.  We escaped as soon as we could.

Instead we meandered about the are, here's a monument on the eastern side of town overlooking the beach area in front of Arromanches.

Here's Martha and I in front of a rusting bridge hulk remains on the beach near the museum.

Nicely done diorama of the Mulberry structures and how they were put together during the invasion.

After Arromanches and lunch, we rode in the bus over to Omaha Beach:

At the section where the memorial to the 1st and 29th 

Infantry divisions

We spotted this rental rig in the parking lot

One of the reasons I had wanted to see Omaha Beach was to try and get a feel for the obstacles encountered by the soldiers coming off the landing craft on D-Day.  

A lot has changed of course, there's houses now at the bottom of the cliff/ridge they had to climb under fire for one thing.  Basically though, those soldiers had to fight their way up a sloping wall of earth, under fire and amidst confusion, chaos and explosions.  Truly they were incredibly brave men.   

The picture below shows the marker where the first cemetery for fallen soldiers was located next to the beach.  It was later moved to the top of the ridge you see behind it.

A different portion of the ridge/line of hills.  You can see a couple of machine gun ports near the top.  Can you spot the white critter?  It was a cat of all things....stead footedly climbing the side of the cliff!

We saw many of these Rapeseed/Canola fields as we rode around the Normandy area.

After Omaha Beach we rode the bus to the nearby American Cemetery.  9387 soldiers are buried there.

Here's a look at the ceiling of the chapel:

The memorial where the surrounding walls are engraved with the names of the soldiers who died in the area, not just the ones on D-Day.

The lightly rainy and overcast skies were a suiting accompaniment to our sober visit to this site.

This was the last stop, we then spent a bit over 2 hours returning to the ship in Le Havre.  For whatever reason, unfathomable to me, the French decided to shut down two of the four lanes of the bridge near Honfleur for work on the bridge.  This of course delayed us more than the 90 minutes that it had taken originally to go to the beaches area.

Great timing on the part of the French, as the roads were already heavy with traffic since it's a long weekend for them due to Easter.  Oh well.

Anyways, we made it back to the ship with no further issues.

Today, April 19

Sunrise as the ship approached Dover, England:

We disembarked for the last time this morning and caught a 15 passenger van to the airport in Gatwick.  We're staying at the Hilton overnight and catching a flight out to Bilbao, Spain early in the morning.  Stay tuned.