Noble Normandy

Claude Monet's Gare St-Lazare

Saturday, August 14, 2004 - Paris to Caen

We have an early train to Caen in Normandy from the Gare St- Lazare.  The station would be within walking distance if I could practice some self-restraint in packing.  However, with my 70-pound duffle and 20-pound backpack, we decide to take a taxi.  The desk clerk warns us that it could be difficult getting someone to take us on such a short trip even though, theoretically, they can‘t refuse a fare.  I imagine that if we found someone like last night’s driver, we would not have a problem.  He’d just drive around until he got the meter to what he thought he deserved.  We consider the “user unfriendly” Metro but neither of us wants to negotiate the steps and the train change.  So we strike out from the hotel picking our way around the left-over dregs of a Pigalle Friday night.

Caen Castle Ruins

I flag down a taxi driven by a skull-capped male, obviously of Middle Eastern descent.  He doesn’t want to take us but relents when I say I will be generous with my tip.  It helps that I pull my notebook and pen out while looking at his license plate.  After the less than five-minute ride, I give him slightly more than double what is on the meter.  He asks me if I think that this is a generous tip.  I reply that Yes, I do, to which he responds by asserting that he doesn’t need such small tips.  I then suggest that if he feels that way, I’d be glad to take my money back.  He turns, marches to his taxi and drives off in a snit, a type of vehicle found in every large city with insolent cab drivers.

We find our train compartment.  After getting all our bags stored and feeling really comfy, a group of people with tickets interrupt us for our seats.  Oops!  I screwed up.  We are in the right seats but the wrong car.  We get “uncomfy” and move to our proper seats for the uneventful ride to Caen.

We arrive in Caen before Noon.  We will be staying at a Best Western Hotel, Le Dauphine.  It is described as being “near the train station.”  As usual, “near” is a relative term and we cannot even find a map with our hotel’s street on it anywhere near the train station.  We see no taxis.  We ask a few people for directions but they either speak no English or have never heard of Le Dauphine.

By this time, we are hungry and grumpy (two of the seven dwarves).  I have a brilliant idea.  Since we will be renting a car for tomorrow, we’ll go to the Hertz office and they will be able to direct us to our hotel.  Problem is that all the car rental places are closed from 12:00 Noon to 2:00 PM and it is now past noon.

What to do?  What to do?  That’s easy - baguettes and beer.  We find a brasserie across from the station with sidewalk seating and settle in for the long wait.  While we are sitting there, eating and laughing at ourselves, we strike up a conversation with a couple having lunch at a nearby table.  They introduce themselves as J.C. and Caroline Thomas.  After enduring our less than hilarious J.C. comments, they tell us they are relocating back to Caen, his hometown.  They had lived in the Carolinas for two years, a while back, and recognized our Yankee accents and behavior.  They, obviously, liked living in the U.S., otherwise they would have ignored us.  They are a delightful couple and give us a ride to our hotel.  They also invite us to join them for dinner.  I am, once again, fascinated with the serendipity of travel.  If we hadn’t gotten lost, we would have never met the Thomases.

We check in at the hotel, which is a refurbished Chateau.  I find that in Europe, at least France, Germany and England, Best Westerns seem to offer the best value - three star quality, reasonable prices and interesting venues.  We do have to carry our bags up two flights of stairs.  The clerk offers to help, but we realize the bags are bigger than he is so we turn his offer down and struggle up the stairs ourselves.

I’m exhausted so I take a short nap and then grab a tram back to the station to rent our car.  You may wonder why I didn’t rent the car earlier.  I’m trying to hold the rental period to under 48 hours, thereby saving an extra day’s charges.  There are a few people ahead of me so I have to wait.  I notice how different the French and the British are in their interactions with the clerk.  The French family members are assertive and ask many questions.  The British couple is very polite and diffident and ask almost no questions.  I wish I could step back and watch myself.  The Hertz people are very nice, answer all my questions, and give me good directions back to the hotel.  Later I spend an hour and a half deleting some 2400 spams from my e-mail box at a nearby Cyber Café.

The Thomases pick us up at dusk and we first visit the castle in the center of Caen where we are treated to a beautiful sunset.  We walk to the Vaugueux area, an old part of town that has many restaurants and bars.  It’s Saturday night so the place is packed but we finally find a small bistro that looks good.

Vaugueux Area, Caen

The food is great, especially the steamed mussels in white wine and cream.  The wine is terrific.  The conversation is scintillating.  The service sucks.  The kitchen is upstairs and there are only two people waiting on tables for both floors.  The owner stays ensconced behind her cash register; arms folded, and does not pitch in to help.  The Thomases point out that this is not unusual for old-line French restaurateurs.  How different from the U.S. or Asia, where an owner would be working his or her ass off.  How different from the Tunisian’s place in Paris where the owner spent 15 minutes helping us decide what to order and what wine to choose.  C’est la vie.

After dinner, we head for the parking lot under the castle only to find it totally locked up.  We can’t seem to find a way in.  J.C. dispatches us to a nearby bar to wait while he searches for an entrance and his car.  He does show up eventually and drives us to our hotel.  We crash immediately since tomorrow is D-Day beaches day.

Pegasus Bridge

Sunday, August 15, 2004 - D-Day Beaches

Our guide for the day is John Flaherty of Hand Maid Tours, his solely owned company.  I had spent three days with John in March 2003 visiting, not only the D-Day invasion sites but also the Bayeux Monastery and Tapestry as well as a number of outstanding restaurants and bars.  John is living out his fantasy.  He’s British by nationality with an Irish surname.  He chucked it all a few years ago and bought a 300 year old farmhouse in a small crossroads village and lives there with his wife, Elaine.  She’s a sweetheart, a superb cook, and teaches English as a Second Language in the area, a renaissance woman.  He is an invasion buff, obsessed with bunkers and concrete.  He also does tours of the Loire Valley and is a bit of a wine connoisseur.  He’s also an expert on Calvados, the apple brandy of Normandy.  He convinced me of that halfway through a bottle of the local product.  He never wears shoes, only sandals even in the Winter.  He wears his hair quite long and is well-known and respected, not only by other WW II buffs but also by the local people, a difficult accomplishment with the French.  He’s the perfect choice to fill Tom’s head to overflowing with all the information he will share. 

I’m looking forward to re-visiting some of the places I saw in March, 2003.  I also want to hear John’s stories of the 60th anniversary celebrations held in June.  I don’t intend to go into great detail on all the places we visited.  If you are interested in the details, please use the links I’ve provided.  In addition, I have over 100 pictures on my photo site, most of which are from my 2003 trip to the area.  There is a ton of material on the D-Day invasion, 996,000 web references on Google alone.  Your interest my be as great or greater than mine so I encourage you to research what is a great historical event and if you get turned on, contact John and spend some time visiting the area. 

We meet John at the train station.  He will be driving us in my rental car.  Our first stop is Pegasus Bridge.  The site of the famous British glider drop.  We drive to the British and Canadian beaches, Sword, Gold, and Juno.  Unfortunately the long weekend creates a huge traffic jam and the beaches are so packed with tourists that we can‘t get close enough to see anything.  Parking is out of the question.  The houses in this area come right down to the road that runs along the beaches.  Our only choice is to drive slowly while John describes the history of the area.  I feel bad for Tom.  I was lucky in 2003 because it was March and there were very few people about.

Tom at the American Cemetery

We finally manage to get out of the car a short way south at Longue sur Mer, a site overlooking the beaches with many artillery casemates, bunkers and other interesting sights.  We decide to lunch at a nearby beach that is somewhat deserted because of its location, south of the resort area.  The food is wonderful.  The pommes frite are superb and once again I am surprised at how good European food is, even out of a hut on the beach. 

We finish lunch and next visit Pointe du Hoc, where 250 U.S. Army Rangers scaled the cliffs only to find that the guns they intended to put out of action had been moved.  135 out of 250 Rangers died in the attempt.  The cliff face is crumbling into the ocean so we can’t get close to the monument honoring the Rangers.  The area is covered with bomb craters and busted up bunkers which gives a clue as to why the Germans moved the guns.  Thousands of tons of bombs were dropped here prior to D-Day.  We can look down on Omaha Beach from here.  Pieces of the supposedly temporary Mulberry Harbor are still there.  The beach is now used mostly for the cultivation of clams and mussels.  What a benign end for such a bloody site.

We next visit the American cemetery at Colleville/Saint Laurent sur Mer.  It is the cemetery featured in the movie “Saving Private Ryan.”  President Bush attended a Memorial Service there on the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day.  The first time I visited this place, I couldn’t stop weeping.  This time I teared up only part of the time.  I can only imagine what the men buried here went through and I am deeply moved this time as I was last time.  John is a member of a group of nearby residents who place flowers on the graves on a regular basis.  He’s adopted three graves including that of a major who shares his family name, Flaherty.  .

We leave the cemetery and drive to Utah Beach.  We walk around for a bit before visiting the town of Ste Mere Eglise.  Many 101st Airborne troops were killed here.  You may recall the scene from the movie, “The Longest Day,” where Red Buttons hangs from the steeple as his buddies are mowed down in the courtyard.  They have a full size model of an American Paratrooper hanging from the steeple. 

John leaves us here and we manage to get back to Caen, with me driving but without getting lost.  The only explanation is that Tom is a great navigator. 

We decide to eat in the center of town and choose a German restaurant.  We are more interested in the beer than the food.  The restaurant has been here for over 100 years and is more Alsatian than German but the food is excellent and the beer meets our expectations.  Life is good, thanks in part to the thousands who died on the beaches only minutes from here.

Caen Peace Memorial Museum

Monday, August 16, 2004 - Caen

Tom and I oversleep, sort of on purpose.  I’m dragging a little.  Must be the result of being on the road for six weeks.  Not so much just being on the road as always being in new places, which makes it difficult to relax.  I think traveling is sometimes more enjoyable in the abstract than it is in reality.  I’m sure the life of a travel writer is less exciting than I imagined a couple months ago.

I do get the opportunity to learn something new today.  I am totally steamed when I discover that my Hertz rental was given to me with less than a full tank of gas.  Tom and I agree to have our morning coffee and roll near the train station so I can give the Hertz people a piece of what little mind I have left.

Memorial Garden, Caen Peace Museum

I present my irrefutable arguments expecting some kind of lame response.  The clerk smiles instead and sweetly explains that on the rental form, the gas level is noted as ¾ full.  This is my first time running into this situation.  As soon as I recover the piece of my mind that I had expended earlier, I realize that the whole thing makes sense.  They do not have access to a gas pump on the premises and on the weekend, they have no one to send out to fill the tank.  After apologizing for being an idiot, I drive us to the Caen Memorial Peace Museum. 

We finally find the site, which is packed with cars.  The “Feast of the Assumption” holiday strikes, again.  The place is beautiful, though, and the building impressive.  We stand in line for 30 minutes to enter the exhibit area.  The exhibits are magnificent covering the complete history of WW II including the pre-war events leading to the conflict and the winter 1939-40 phony war, the occupation, the holocaust and the liberation of Normandy and France.  The design creates a bottleneck, though, because the first exhibits are set up linearly which backs everyone up like a traffic jam on a freeway with no exits.  One person’s interest becomes everyone else’s delay.  Once through the initial exhibits, though, things open up.  Overall, I would say that the exhibits are impressive, well planned and artistic but the museum as a whole is not as user friendly as it could be.

The cafeteria and restaurant have excellent food.  There is, of course, a long queue that we gladly endure.  After lunch, we visit additional exhibits covering the worldwide aspect of the war, the Cold War, and the “Hope Exhibit,” which was a bit confusing.  The “Hope” multi-media presentation was wonderful, though.  We finally run out of steam but do find the energy to visit the outdoor gardens.  I would compare this museum favorably with the Peace Museum in Hiroshima.

We drive back to our hotel without incident where I drop Tom before turning the car in to Hertz.  They even give me a refund for the difference between a full tank and one ¾ full.  I grab a tram back to the hotel, catch a bit of the Olympics and a short nap.

We decide to dine in the Vagueux area again.  We find an appealing outdoor venue for drinks and dinner.  While enjoying a meal ending cappuccino, we see J.C. and Caroline Thomas walking by after their meal.  Caroline’s mother is with them.  She’s helping with their move.  We repair to a nearby bistro for an after dinner drink, delightful conversation and laughter.  .

We stroll back to Le Dauphine.  I take a quick look at the Olympics and I’m out to the world.  Later, I wake up long enough to turn the TV off.  On to Strasbourg tomorrow.