Driving and DDay

Wow, what an interesting day and night!

We left Paris early to start our trip to the beaches of Normandy. Now, driving in Paris is an experience unto itself... Here we are, a bunch of Texas yahoos driving a Ford minivan down the Champs Elysees... It's seven lanes of traffic with absolutely no lines marked on the road. Motorcycles are driving in and out, people just go wherever they want to, when they want to and there are like five tiny signs that tell you where to go...

AH! After a small coronary, we finally managed to make it out of town. We headed to Arromanches, or Gold Beach, where the British landed and made a false port in order to bring in supplies and harbor their troops. Armed with directions from mapquest (and we all know how accurate they are) we navigated our way through tiny tiny French villages, numerous cows, and tiny yellow street signs to actually find the place. Since we didn't have any kind of map, we just used our killer driving instincts to make it alive, which is a good thing because none of the cows spoke English.

After viewing the remnants of the port, we got our map (a.k.a. paper place mat from the restaurant) and headed to the American cemetery. Now armed with our mapquest directions and placemat the trip was much easier. The American cemetery is beautiful. It's so powerful to stand along all the crosses and read the names and places they were from. It makes you so proud to be American and know that these men gave their lives for our Freedom. We took the walk down the steep cliff to Omaha beach. Standing there will be something we'll all remember forever. You could imagine the beach strewn with men and equipment, the water full of ships, and the air humming with bullets... Amazing!

We then made a quick stop in St-Mere-Eglise. The town was the first liberated by the 82nd airborne after being dropped in the area in the wee hours of D-Day. A paratrooper got stuck on the chapel roof only to be saved from certain death by one of his comrades. There is a monument here to him today.

THEN, we headed in the dark and rain to our chateau for the night. There was no moon, no stars and no light. We finally get here only to discover that the Count and Countess were away for the night. So we were met by a man who speaks limited English. He greeted us and then promptly left us alone in this gigantic creaking house with three lights. AHHHHHHHHHHHH! Now I get scared in my own house at night. This was WAY Creepy! There are tons of pictures of dead family members watching you. Luckily Bob brought a flashlight so we spent the night snooping around and getting creeped out. No ghosts got us though!

Off to Mont-St-Michel! We'll blog later!