Around The World – Caen, France
My goal today is to head north to Normandy and visit the sites of the D-Day invasion.
In Le Mans, I took the tram up into the center of town to the station. I had to wait about an hour, then walked right onto the train and sat down. Since it’s a regional train, it’s all 2nd class seating but I had a group of four seats with a table to myself.
I arrived in Caen (sounds like Kawn) at about noon on a Sunday. Worst thing you can do is find yourself in a small French town on a Sunday. Everything is closed. First priority is to get to the Airbnb and drop off my suitcase. Earlier I had asked the host which bus to take to the cottage and she gave me the same walking directions that are in her profile. I guess there is no bus so I’ll walk. 40 minutes later, rolling my suitcase down the road in the cold and rain I pass the #3 bus stop just spitting distance from the cottage. Argh. She also sent me a message that I have to get the linens out and make the bed and then make it again with clean linens when I leave for the next people. Oh, and there’s a cat that lives there and I have to feed and water it. Hmm, there’s going to be a hungry and thirsty cat… The front door has a flap and it goes in and out constantly. I had to reboot the Wifi to get it to connect and the speed is really terrible. This place certainly isn’t all what it was cracked up to be.
Checking the #3 bus schedule, I see it runs every hour on Sundays and the next one is 45 minutes so I walk back into town, much easier than with the suitcase. At the train station I buy a 3 day pass for bus & tram and jump on the Tram A into the “chateau” in the center of town. As castles go, it’s just huge. I mean, the size of a small town with a wall around it huge. Built on a natural hill, with perhaps 50 foot high walls to repel invaders. This castle was the home of William The Conqueror, Duke Of Normandy around AD 1035 before he went on to bigger and better things as King Of England. They’re excavating and rebuilding areas to show how it was back a thousand years ago.
It’s 4pm now and I’m giving up on the cold and need to get some food. Nothing is open, no grocery stores, or mini marts or restaurants. I did find a hole-in-the-wall kebab place and got two orders of falafel wraps, snarfed one down and brought the other one home to eat later tonight or in the morning.
Another thing that’s closed is the Tourist Office which sells tickets to the D-Day beaches and museums bus tours. It opens at 9:30 tomorrow so I’ll head in early and sign up.
In the morning I took the #3 bus to the gare (train station), then tram A to the Tourist office about 10AM. I asked the girl for a ticket on one of the two D-Day beaches tour companies I had read about, she had to call one to see if they were running today, luckily yes. Booked for 12:45. Wandered through the St. Pierre cathedral next to the castle, then through the old streets of the city. As with most medieval European towns, there’s a mixture of very old buildings in one section and modern stuff in another. I had lunch at a creperie, spinach, cheese and egg crepe main course, then a nougat ice cream one for dessert.
Tour guide Vanessa arrived in a small Fiat minivan and there are two other people on the tour, Juan is from Colombia and is a med school grad in Pamplona, Spain. His girlfriend Miriam is from Paris. Vanessa told us this was the last tour of the year, as the weather turns bad and the tourists dry up, I got very lucky that I was here on the last day of November!
Any mistakes in my descriptions of the D-Day events and locations below are purely my own.
On our way out of town, Vanessa said that 80% of Caen was destroyed during the invasion, and 2000 civilians were killed. We then drove up to Pointe du Hoc where we walked through a German gun emplacement right on a cliff face that was stormed by the American Rangers just after dawn on D-Day. The area had been bombed in preparation for the landing and the area is pockmarked by 10′ deep bomb craters now softened by decades of weather and grass. The Rangers suffered terrible casualties only to find that the Germans had moved the big guns back a few kilometers and put dummy wooden guns in place. The real guns were destroyed leading to an opening for soldier and supply boats to approach the coast. Despite the bombings and D-Day storming and 70 years of brutal weather, you can still walk through the reinforced underground rooms and gun emplacements. Standing on the calm cliff gives no indication of the horrible events that took place here. Thi is where Tom Hanks brought his team onshore in “Saving Private Ryan.”
We then went to Omaha Beach in St. Laurent-sur-Mer, the site of the major American landing. There is a rebuilt bunker with a gun emplacement inside – this was hit by a shell from a tank and the roof caved in, leading to the successful landings. Despite the bunker and a sculpture and a couple of old guns, you would have no way of knowing this was the major point of invasion of Europe by the Allies and turned the tide against the Germans.
We then went to the the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. Most of the soldiers remains were transferred to this central location from about 14 smaller cemeteries hastily constructed throughout the area during the invasion. It has an impressive wall with the names of the still-missing carved into it. Just beyond that is a huge map showing all of France and the major landing points, troop movements and battles leading to the end of the war.
Beyond this are the white stone grave markers that you saw in “Saving Private Ryan.” Row upon row of laser-straight markers. What hit me was the ultimate futility of war either “good” ones or “bad” ones, depending on your point of view. We just end up with a lot of dead people, lives cut short and families who have to live with the losses.
Lastly we went to Arromanches, where the Allies built an artificial seawall and 3 major piers for offloading ships. A similar one built at Omaha was destroyed by a storm after 3 days but the Arromanches one survived and was a major unloading point for the whole invasion. We then walked over to a cafe and all had hot chocolate to warm up after a day of cold, blustery winds.
On the 30 minute drive back to Caen, Juan and Miriam and I discussed our travels and the terrorist acts in Paris and around the world. I took the tram and bus back to my place and had that cold falafel wrap from the day before.
Shortly after this leg of the trip I watched “The Longest Day” and “Saving Private Ryan” and those tellings of the invasion against the background of the locations I had stood in really struck a nerve.
Next stop, Bordeaux and a lot of wine.
