Date:3/4/2022-3/14/2022
Destination: France
Goal: Normandy, Brittany, and Paris Culture
Distance: 4089 Miles
Means of Travel: Flying
Potential Credits: 0
COVID-19 took a lot for a lot of things for a lot of people. Weddings, graduations, and of course, travel was put on hold to stop the spread of the extremely contagious global pandemic. And (knock on wood), we've for the most part beaten it. And now that things are getting back to normal, we've been able to do a lot of the things we had planned. However, some things, unfortunately, couldn't wait until the end.
When the pandemic started, my grandma and grandpa were in their native France, visiting the family homeland like they do almost every year. And my parents were supposed to fly out and join them. However, while they were over there, the coronavirus was surging in Italy, threatening all of Europe like a low-hanging storm cloud, and the pandemic was getting very global very fast. They ended up coming home on an emergency, having to scramble and switch their flights so they could get through the US border before it closed, dodging the virus that's so dangerous to people their age. And worst of all, I couldn't see them after they got home for the same reason. I saw them once in October for my grandfather's birthday, but had no idea it was the last time I would see him.
My grandfather passed away over Christmas of 2020, and due to COVID regulations in the hospital, I couldn't be there with him to say goodbye. This made the loss even harder on me, I was kicking myself for not being the perfect grandson, and I would have done anything to tie up this loose end. But when I asked my dad if he had any end of life plans in place, I was told, "he wants us to take his ashes to France. Like, all of us." Done deal, it was settled. I was going to France for the first time since my early childhood.
Early March was the time to go to France, for some reason. Everything was in bloom right, flights were most affordable, no parks were open but that didn't matter. Between all of us getting to say goodbye to my grandfather, grandma continuing her trip that was cut short on behalf of herself and her late husband, and my parents even getting on that plane to France in the first place, this was bigger than riding roller coasters.
This trip was about regrets, unfinished business, and what it really means to live life to its fullest.
And food. And alcohol. LOTS of food and alcohol.
Jour 0- Blame Air Can'tada
Our flight left early in the afternoon, meaning I had to take off work at lunch and run over to my parents' place to change out of my nastyass work clothes and into more comfortable plane clothes before getting the show on the road. My father was the only one home, with my mother already in Columbus with my grandmother. So we got on the road, dad and I drove to Columbus, and arrived at the first of three airports that would service this trip: CMH.
Dad and I had no issues finding my mom and grandma, considering the latter was wearing her trademark bright yellow raincoat. So with that we went to the airport's new restaurant, got some okay lunch, and got a move on!
Air Canada was to serve this trip with a Toronto connection, having been the go-to for these trips back to France my grandparents always took. And this decision always puzzled me, wondering why you'd go through the trouble of throwing in a connection in a foreign country when Delta has a flight out of Cincinnati directly to Paris. But it's what she does and it's what she did with my grandfather, so it's what we were going to do. I thought flying them would be cool, honestly. I mean, I love all things Canadian, right? Well they started putting a sour taste in my mouth almost as soon as we started interacting with them. The counter agents ended up holding up both us and this UK travel party asking us for a negative COVID test we knew we didn't need to get into Canada, which took about twenty minutes to clear up. So we do that, get through TSA, and get to our gate...where they delay our flight for about half an hour before we load on the tarmac. Okay, a bit annoying, but could be way worse. (DUN...DUN...DUNNNNN...)
So we get taken off and to the skies northbound for our connection in Toronto, and we flew over Cedar Point so that was kind of cool! An hour and a half and a few shitty plane window photos later, we were in Toronto!
My sister had flown into Toronto way earlier that day from Houston where she lives, and finding her waiting for us in our terminal was like the big "let the games begin" moment when the travel party has fully assembled and we're ready to start having fun as a group with nobody missing. And what a better way to celebrate Canada-style than with some good Chinese-Canadian dim sum and a Caesar? A wonderful dinner later, and we were ready to head into the plane and take to the skies for Paris! Right?
...right?
Nobody, and I mean, NOBODY likes flying transatlantic. Even though I haven't done it since early childhood, I remember how brutal it was. My ADHD doesn't like to let me sleep at all even in a fluffy hotel bed, let alone in an uncomfortable airplane seat. Before the trip, my partner Beth got me this adorable neck pillow that looks like a dragon so I knew he would help, and Air Canada provided those little plane pillows and blankets, but I knew I wouldn't sleep well and would spend all six of those hours wishing I was somewhere else.
Fuck Air Canada. Make that nine. NINE. For an extra three hours, the time it takes to drive from Dayton to Cedar Point, we were sitting Canada geese on the tarmac. No clear announcement, no snacks, they just kept us in the dark sitting at the gate for no reason. Finally they backed us out and got us in the air, but by then I was already begging for the flight to be over and we weren't even in the air.
Hardy har har, how bout that airline food? LOLOLOLOLOL
Okay, I know we just ate, but my fat ass can't be cranky when there's food and/or alcohol. My grandparents had a tradition of getting a red and a white wine each on the flight, so I did the same. And I know airline food has been roasted like leathery roast beef by many a standup comic, but this cod with coconut sauce and rice was really good. Not usually a carrot cake guy but that wasn't bad either.
West Side Story was the movie of choice for this flight, and it was very good, but I honestly shouldn't have watched something that was sad and depressing on a flight that was already testing my patience with a 3 hour delay. So after I finished it I kicked my shoes off and attempted to sleep at what would've been 2 am Ohio time.
Two hours later, I woke up in blazing sunlight with two more hours to go before landing. And I felt like SHIT. Everything hurt and I didn't feel rested. They came around with these croissants in plastic wrappers for breakfast as we flew over England. Finally, we touched down in Paris and got off the plane at noon their time, three hours later than we should have been.
We had to fill out paperwork to go to France detailing our quarantine plans and signing a sworn statement that we didn't have any COVID symptoms. Well...we didn't need it I think. They were never collected on the plane, French passport control didn't ask when our passports were stamped, we kept them with us with nobody asking about them.
And just when this landing couldn't get any crazier...because Air Canada delayed our flight and didn't communicate it to Enterprise, they gave our reserved rental car to someone else and had to go dumpster diving for another beat up French car to get us. They ended up finding us one and we got on the road, still needing to drive another four hours to St. Vaast La Hogue, out of which the Normandy leg of the trip would be based.
French cars are beat to hell for some reason. Not sure why, but every single rental car had some sort of dent or paint transfer on it.
Every time I go somewhere, there's always that "oh shit" moment. That moment when you see or do something that really cements in your brain just how far from home you are. Maybe it's driving out of the airport and seeing how different the terrain is, maybe it's hearing a song from back home you forgot about, but it happens on almost every trip I take. This trip? It was seeing this castle on the side of the highway, driving home that I was in a country where most of the buildings were vastly older than back at home. This thing was straight out of one of my DND campaigns I'm playing in!
As things got less urban and more rural, the drive got more and more beautiful.
Ils voyent nous rollin', ils hatin! Riding in the French beater car was...interesting. The visor had this strangely hilarious diagram of an airbag yeeting a child in a car seat. And mom asked, "what's that button do?" I told her it resembled a monkey doing the Thriller dance, she thought I was joking, but when I took a close up photo and sent it, she just laughed in agreement. My sister just told me, "you dumbass, that's not a monkey that's a lion." But no argument that it was clearly doing the Thriller.
We never figured out what it did. Nobody was brave enough to play "What's This Button Do?"
We stopped at this travel stop that strongly resembled one of Canada's OnRoute stations that are secretly the backbone of Ontario. Not like some sketchy US rest stop with a vending machine and a bathroom with a trucker that pulls his pants all the way down at the urinal, this was an actual, inhabited facility with operating businesses such as stores and restaurants. There was this cafeteria-style restaurant where we chose to eat, and going in, the hostess asked for our Pass Sanitaire, or Health Pass. In France, COVID vaccines and recoveries are tracked by electronic QR codes that are tied to a government record, but because 'Murica and because freedom, we get these little index cards that any old Pharmacist Phil could photocopy himself. So she seemed a bit confused when she took out the tablet to scan our QR codes and we all pulled out paper and explained we were American and these were our only records of vaccination. She wasn't sure about accepting the single J&J dose on my parents' cards (grandma and sister are Pfizer, I'm Moderna, all of us had two base doses and a booster where my parents only had one of each), but ultimately let us in. I got these sausages with rice, potatoes, and this delicious shallot sauce. The wine was a bit drier than I wanted but it was still delicious.
Drive to St. Vaast La Hougue continued when dad reached around to pull something out of his bag in the back...and the most obnoxious seatbelt alarm in the world went off. And when you're running on as little sleep as we were and there's five people on a long drive just looking for anything to crack a smile, this was pretty fucking funny.
...aaand later on the drive we get into a jam. As I very quickly learn that the French cannot drive anymore than America can, a wreck stopped up the two-lane highway to Normandy. Fortunately they're at least smart enough to split for emergency vehicles instead of racing them, but this held us up a lot! We ended up getting off shortly before this bridge to see a car completely smashed up and flipped upside-down. The traffic was annoying, but I'd much rather take a hassle like that than what could have happened to that poor individual. Hope they were okay!
Aaand then moving right along, we got to the town of Caen. The unique thing about this town is that it was basically reduced to rubble during World War II, so most of the buildings are way newer than most of the towns in Normandy. The only things there that were particularly historic were one of William the Conqueror's castles and this cool cathedral.
Finally, after 4 hours work, 1 hour drive, COVID confusion in Columbus, 1.5 hours to Toronto, 9 hours to France that should have been 6, 1 hour of rental car confusion, and 4 hours of driving that turned into god-knows-how-many, I saw the iconic marine traffic tower of Tatihou that overlooked St. Vaast La Hougue! We were finally there!
Helloooooo, St. Vaast La Hougue!
We got there, met our landlords renting the apartments that would serve as our homes for the next week, and got our stuff out and upstairs to our harbor-view living quarters.
We needed dinner stuff, but I was simply done for the day. I was sweaty, I had been at work without a shower, my socks felt grimy and itchy, and my naturally oily hair was getting outright slimy. It was fucking gross. Not to mention the extreme sleep deprivation at play from barely sleeping on the plane and and every little tactile thing feeling very irritating from all that time awake. So I want to just shower and put some clean PJs on and stay home and crank the heat in the cold apartment...but grandma tries to guilt me into going to the store with everybody. So we get downstairs, mom tells me she thought I wasn't going, I tell her I don't want to but apparently I have to, she tells me I don't have to so I go back upstairs to freshen up and get some heat flowing while everyone else goes to the little market and gets dinner. So I took the opportunity to film this tour of our place!
By the time they got home, I was good and showered and changed into my jammies, and they brought home stuff for charcuterie! Not crappy American charcuterie with Lunchables on a piece of wood, like good authentic French charcuterie with cornichon and different types of saucisson and baguette with the cheese served separately. Among the offerings this night was andouille, not as in spicy Cajun andouille, but like authentic French andouille from Normandy: a type of saucisson made from tripe. I was apprehensive to try it at first, but mom and I decided to take bites at the same time and it honestly just tasted like overly smoked meat. Not something I would die to devour, but I didn't mind it.
At this point I was ready to black out so I offered to help clean up, I was shooed away, and passed out basically as soon as my head hit the pillow. Tomorrow began quite the day!
Jour 1- French Cuisine Takes The Suppository Cake
After the best sleep ever, I slept in due to the window shades in French apartments being effective enough to keep the room pitch black even with a blazing sunrise coming up, and I was still a bit tired from the day before, but breakfast was served and I can't be cranky when food's in play.
Dad had gone up the street to the little patisserie to snag croissants and petit pain au chocolat (think like a croissant but not crescent shaped and with two sticks of chocolate wrapped in the dough) for breakfast.
St. Vaast La Hougue is a little harbor town with this gated marina sort of at its heart, with a city built around it. Boats can access it only high tide when the water level is high enough, when the tide goes out a lock closes, sealing the water in as the ocean goes out, revealing oyster fields in the tidal sands. There was a set of binoculars in the apartment that I used to watch the fishermen harvest oysters at low tide. There was all kinds of activity on the harbor in front of us, including but not limited to E.T. the dirty dog that always had to show up and piss on their fishing nets!
After breakfast we stopped by Gosselin, a little French general store in town with the coolest stuff! Confit du canard in a can, cassoule in a can, pate, French cheeses, and an alcohol section larger than the rest of the main store are among the things you can find at this wonderful little business.
Leaving Gosselin, there was a little bakery next door that the women popped into, and ended up purchasing this odd French tart with eyedroppers sticking out of it. Turns out those eyedroppers were filled with calvados, a very strong brandy made with apples that serves as an important staple of Normandy cuisine. It was apparently for grandmother's day which was today, which was appropriate considering I was traveling with my grandmother. Remember this cake...
On the way out, the store owner, who had spoken to us and showed us to our desired alchol of choice to fuel this vacation, stopped me, and asked me to open my pockets. I thought I was being accused of shoplifting, but he proceeds to drop six tiny bottles in my pockets, tells me they're wines from Alsace (region in eastern France with deep German influence, they make a lot of Riesling and Gewürztraminer) and tells me my French is very good. THAT, my friends, is why you bother learning the language!
After dropping off our groceries, we went out to go walk down the harbor, get some oysters for the night, and maybe snag some lunch. And it was W I N D Y! My grandma could barely hear anything with the wind in her hearing aid and the waves were battering this section of coastline with some decent force.
We stopped and got lunch on the way back and found this little Brasserie place (sort of the French equivalent of a mom & pop diner back in the US, but with the elegance you expect pretty much everywhere in this country) and sat down for some good Normandy seafood! Grandma and I shared a thing of cidre, a hard cider like Angry Orchard but way better and drier.
Lunch was foie gras and aile du raie. Translation: the liver of a very fat duck served before the wing of a ray with a cream sauce. And typical French frites, of course, way better than what we had at home. There was a barnacle on my ray but other than that it was absolutely delicious.
Getting back, I wanted to check out this souvenir shop near the apartment that had travel posters that I wanted, so mom and dad went with me. Got a keychain, models of St. Vaast's sea towers and Mont St. Michel for my wall of landmarks, and a beanie for my partner. But going to ring out, I noticed these little square wet wipe packets on a rack on the cashier's counter, and one of them had a cutesy drawing of two sheep having sex in front of Mont St. Michel. So I picked it up and showed it to my parents for a laugh, handing it to my mother, when she shrieks and asks "Jarrett why would you hand me one of those!?" The humor was more directed at dad, so I expected her to not find it funny, but I had no idea why she was so bothered until I went to put it back and saw the sign hanging above the rack: "LATEX CONDOMS." My ace ass handed my mother a condom thinking it was a wet wipe, I wanted to jump in the freezing harbor. I have NEVER seen my father laugh at me as hard as he did there!
Later this afternoon, my fat ass wanted to eat some more, so I headed back to that bakery...and ran into quite the threatening toilet! I'm a member of "Toilets With Threatening Auras" on Facebook, so when I found this random urinal in this gazebo thing in full view of the street, it had to go there! You would have literally had to triple dog dare me to whip it out and take a leak there, one wrong move and your ninnies and turkums would be frozen to the porcelain!
Exploring St. Vaast a bit more, I ran into La Chapelle, a small church built at the tip of the town to honor sailors lost at sea. Grandma had told me it was one of her favorite things in St. Vaast, so it was cool to just kind of run into it while wandering around and adventuring.
It was windy and I went over to take photos of the waves as they battered the town when I noticed two of these towers built along fortifications along the coastline. Upon asking my grandmother, she told me that they date back to Louis XVI and were built to secure the coast. Turns out these old stone towers are still in use by the French government to monitor sea traffic in the English Channel.
But my fat ass came home with this mousse cake and it was <3 <3 <3
So I went upstairs, played Pokemon Shield for a bit, and then it was dinner time, so I headed into the kitchen to see what grandma was cooking up!
Dinner was soup de poisson (fish soup) served before the pates and terrines we had gotten from Gosselin. And a cheese course, of course. Because France.
So we're finishing up dinner and then my grandmother, whose first language is not English and will sometimes not choose the most...appropriate word to describe what she's trying to talk about, asks us, "do we want to get out the suppository cake?" So we get the suppository cake out, we slice it, and squeeze our suppositories of calvados into the cake. And the suppository was good! After that and a few drinks, we hit the hay. We had a bit of a day the next day!
Jour 2- Shopping Sprees and the St. Vaast Freeze
We woke up and did the croissant thing on day two before getting in the car and heading to the little inland town of Briquebec for the marche: a French version of a farmers market which sells durable goods in addition to produce, cheese, and meats.
Cool thing about Briquebec is that the town is home to another one of William the Conqueror's fortifications, and this tower rises high over the rest of the town. Sure some dude decided to just go in the corner and relieve himself on it, but strolling through something this old and historic was insanely cool.
It was a cold and windy morning at the marche, probably for the better considering raw fish on ice was among the offerings sold here, but fortunately things got way more bearable once we were in the town streets out of the cold.
It was 10 am but that didn't stop this guy selling cidre and calvados from offering us a few free samples...and it certainly didn't stop me from taking one!
After the marche, we headed to Auchan, France's major grocery store. It's best described as an Aldi with Kroger Marketplace's selection of foods. One thing that was unique, however, is that there was this little shopping mall thing as you enter the store, and we got lunch at a little brasserie in there. Can't go wrong with a croque madame!
Auchan is just another grocery store to the French, but if you aren't used to it, it's an experience. Fish on ice, not unlike you see all around Normandy, was a thing here, but with these really big shrimp. But you could also see scallops with the orange bit that isn't served in the states, aile du raie, and these really tiny shrimp that my grandma likes.
Oh yeah. And whole rabbit with the head on that looks back at you. Grandma got one for later in the week, which put me in an awkward with my partner, knowing that she loves cute cuddly bunnies and now I had to tell her that I ate a rabbit.
Some, of Auchan's packaging was very much...not okay. Considering back at home we just recently got rid of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben and other racist caricatures on our food packaging, seeing Negrita-branded rum with a person of color on the label and Asian sesame dressings with little conical rice field hats made of cardboard was a bit shocking, especially considering I always viewed Europe to be more socially conscious than America.
And speaking of good old-fashioned American racism, I managed to find the American food section in the international aisle and I was not disappointed in terms of the laugh I got! Disgusting yellow French's mustard, ketchup, hot dogs pickled in jars, pancake mix/syrup, Hershey's white chocolate, barbecue sauce, Frank's Red Hot, and HP Sauce (which I thought was British?) were among the things you can find in the American food aisle in France.
After loading up on what we needed for the week, we headed back to the apartment where I decided I wanted to go walk down that battery wall and photograph that sea control tower, so we coated up and headed to the fortification wall so I could get photos!
I ate the flemmekeuche (Alsacian/Belgian dish that's similar to a white pizza with bacon ham and onions on it) that I got at the marche to hold me over until dinner and it was pretty good! I wasn't that blown away because both me and my grandma can make this dish back at home and it tastes exactly like ours, but I guess that just means we make it really well.
It was COLD! There was a strong wind coming off the ocean and it made for quite a slippery time on that wall with nothing to keep you from going in. I had to be very careful getting close to the edge with my camera.
We walked down the wall for a bit before getting to a staircase where we could walk the rest of it on a bike path. The stairs went down into a puddle and I didn't want to get the only sneakers I packed wet, so I managed to jump over it, find a rock nearby, and toss it in the puddle to create a stepping stone for anybody needing to climb up/down the wall.
At the end of last year, my partner got me into The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and my parents called me because they hadn't heard from me in two days and wanted to make sure I was okay...GREAT game!) But this reminded me so much of the ruins of Hyrule that you see in the game in that there's this fortified tower looming in the distance surrounded by ruins sort of built into the terrain. Or the fact that you can't get close to it because it's still a government facility in use, hop one wrong fence and the guardian music intensifies.
Lighting was complete shit but I wasn't about to do this in the morning to fix it, so I had to get creative with the sun setting behind the tower.
Coming back I finally realized my jacket was unzipped and once I zipped it up I was much less cold...go figure.
Dinner that night was this spiky spider crab stuff that my grandma made, some sort of fish from Auchan, some Vietnamese spring rolls from the marche.
...aaaand also the really big shrimp, which were fun but didn't taste good. In addition to the poop vein in the tail they also had some sort of orange thing running along it that was really unappetizing and I cut out before eating what honestly tasted like subpar Kroger shrimp ring. Fun thing to eat but it wasn't delicious by any means.
And these apple candies filled with calvados that we got out of curiosity. I had had candies that looked exactly like this at Colonial Williamsburg as a kid, and they tasted like gritty balls of wax...not good. So I tell mom they look like these waxy candies, she swears up and down it's not going to be waxy, so her and my sister try one...turns out that this is just a shell made of that wax that basically holds a shot of calvados.
After mom, dad, and my sister turned in for the night, grandma wanted to get into the calvados so we stayed up and did a number on it before hitting the hay at like 1 am. Drinking heavily with my grandmother into ungodly hours of the night probably wasn't the most responsible thing to do considering I had a stacked day ahead of me, but when else can you say you got shitfaced with your grandmother?
Good night, St. Vaast! Got something very special planned for the next day!
Jour 3- The Longest Day
Story Time: A long time ago, in the 1940s, two children had their lives upturned by World War II. One of them, whose mother was a postal worker, was born in that post office because the Germans were taking her town and they couldn't get her and her mom to the hospital with tanks in the street. The other one, a young kid about five, was worried of an allied invasion in their town of Boulogne-Sur-Mer, so out of an abundance of caution, they packed up and moved away from the invasion...and ended up moving to Normandy and getting caught right up in it. These two children went on to meet, fall in love, marry, and have two children. When the woman's sister moved to the United States to be with the American tank driver she had met and fallen in love with, this family followed suit. Years later, both of their children had children of their own, with the younger of the two having hers one day before the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day, the event that changed everything for this family.
The boy that moved from Boulogne to Normandy was my late grandfather. The woman born in the post office was this grandmother that I am traveling with. The younger of their kids is my mother, also on this trip. And the baby born basically on the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day is me.
In addition to all of this, my father is also a D-Day enthusiast (he was salty he couldn't watch the History channel specials since he had a newborn sex gremlin to take care of). And today, my father and I were to explore the sites where D-Day happened and turned Normandy upside-down.
CONTENT WARNING: Mention of war and war death; war movie clips
Our D-Day adventure began with a drive out into the Normandy countryside, full of farmland, these tiny 3-5 building towns scattered throughout, and happy Normandy cows producing the best cheeses and creams in the world.
On the right of this photo you can see one of Normandy's infamous hedgerows, thick walls of trees and brush used to enclose cattle pastures in lieu of fences. These were important during D-Day as they posed an unexpected obstacle for allied forces. The obvious way through a hedgerow is to just go in the opening that's intended for entry/exit, but the Germans were burying mines under these openings and pointing machine guns at them, so every time allied forces would try to enter it was a bloodbath. And tanks couldn't drive through them because some of them were so thick, and often atop a 3 foot deep sunken road. So how to break through? Someone came up with the brilliant idea to weld the metal sea obstacles to the fronts of tanks and use them as battering rams to smash through the trees!
Our first stop was Arromanches, the site of Juno Beach and the makeshift seaport built once the Normandy coast was secure. Out in the water off the coast are dozens of ruined structures, steel and concrete, gathering rust, algae, and barnacles in the ocean. These were once a crudely built boat dock of steel gantries and floating concrete boxes.
Arromanches was home to one of innumerable D-Day museums in the area, way more than you can see in a day. We didn't do any of the other ones, largely because we have the US Air Force museum back at home and a lot of it is stuff you can see and learn there, but these dioramas showing how the port worked was super cool!
This museum had a few other odds and ends of D-Day artifacts, but this yellow cap worn by paratroopers should they land in the water and this anchor thing jumped out at me for some reason.
After browsing a few souvenir shops (this was the touristy part of the D-Day stuff, lots of overpriced brasseries and English speakers), we got on the way to our next stop, but dad and I were getting hungry and none of the restaurants at Arromanches really jumped out at us, so we found some little harbor town between here and there that had a whole row of nice restaurants. Dad tasked me with picking one, something I hate doing because I feel like I'm forcing everyone else involved, but I took charge and selected one based on the menu. Well we got inside, I noticed it was freezing in there, and when dad and I got up and politely said we were switching restaurants because this was too cold, the owner slammed the menu he was holding onto the bar top. So we walked down a bit and got to another little brasserie that was way more popular, and very local with almost no English spoken. I ordered some onion soup and an Indian crepe, but the onion soup was way bigger than I expected and I couldn't finish my crepe!
This seagull was our friend by the window while we ate so dad hooked him up with some of the good shit when we left.
Next stop was Omaha Beach, home of the famed American D-Day cemetery.
The setup for this is amazing. You park, head down a quiet path with simple gardening and an artistic water feature, and turn the corner and see this: Omaha Beach. Eighty years ago, this seemingly innocent cove was turned into a complete and total hellscape by the Axis Powers, and our guys had to charge right into it. Sea hazards littered the shallow water, razor-sharp barbed wire was strung all along the sand, and the Germans were using machine guns that shot ten bullets a second to just spray the beach with bullets. And worst of all, the Americans basically had to use troops as currency, throwing them into a situation they couldn't possibly survive, just to maybe push forward and advance a little. And honestly, it's amazing they were able to even get up here when you imagine how dangerous and terrifying it must have been.
My dad told me, "this is the place everybody knows, and I wouldn't have wanted to be here on D-Day, but I really wouldn't have wanted to be at Pointe du Hoc..."
Turn the corner again, it just goes on forever. Seeing a large cemetery with identical white headstones in perfect soldier formation is nothing new to me, I saw Arlington National Cemetery when I was in middle school, and was even selected to lay a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And this wasn't even as big. But when you realize that this whole thing filled up in pretty much one single day, and these are just the American deaths not counting British or Canadian, it's extremely sobering.
I wanted a photo here but I didn't want to make it a selfie out of respect, so I had Dad take it.
It looks like it just goes up to this little chapel thing towards the back, but you get there and the "back" is actually just the halfway point and there's just as many deaths behind it as there are in front of it.
The little chapel was actually a synagogue, I think?
At the front of the complex on your way back out is this memorial, featuring a statue and map of the D-Day invasion.
Saving Private Ryan's opening is with Omaha Beach, watch this if you don't know the history before continuing.
We left and got back in the car to go to our next stop on our little D-Day tour: Pointe du Hoc. A rocky cape thing with 90-foot cliffs, the Navy heavily bombed it before US Army Rangers scaled this site with the goal of destroying German guns capable of shelling all the way down to Juno Beach, where we were at Arromanches that morning. While facing heavy gunfire, they used ropes and ladders to climb these cliffs while returning fire...only to get to the top and see the guns they were destroying had been telephone poles used as decoys. So they pressed on inland, found the guns, and destroyed them.
We parked and walked towards the path, it was pretty chilly from the winds but I had a jacket. When I saw this sign mentioning "extraordinary acts of courage," what Dad said back at the cemetery really began to sink in...
"Look next to you," Dad told me as I strolled down the path, pointing to a hole in the ground next to me. "That wasn't there the day before the invasion." We kept walking and I saw another. And another. "That's a bomb crater."
We kept walking to the edge of the point before the brush opened up, revealing what I can only describe as a literal hellscape. This place still looked like a war zone! Bomb craters, rusty barbed wire, and concrete rubble littered this otherwise beautiful French coastal cliff. As a photographer, I did my best, but pictures don't do it justice. The scale of the destruction here 80 years later is insane!
The sad thing is that those cliffs that proved to be so deadly that day are actually beautiful.
This, right here, is why those guns needed to go. Somewhere in this view are Omaha and Juno beaches, and the craters created by the German guns that were destroyed here would have been even bigger than the ones left by the Navy according to my father.
Ultimately, over 200 Army Rangers set out to destroy this German artillery on June 6, 1944. Only 90 of them survived. Back at Omaha Beach, I was skeptical as to what my father could have been talking about that could possibly be more horrible than all the barbed wire and machine guns. But I got my answer! This, my friends, is the last place you would have wanted to be on that day, and I felt so bad for not knowing this story until today even though I always had a soft spot for D-Day. Coming here was the perfect way to learn it, it's one I've made it a point to tell when talking about this trip. This was my favorite thing we saw today.
^Movie clip from The Longest Day to illustrate what happened here if I didn't tell the story well.
Our next and final stop on this trip was St. Mere-Eglise, made famous in the D-Day film The Longest Day. Though apparently not as touristy as it once was, this is kind of the rendez-vous point for a lot of the bus tours and the like, and is home to a somewhat unusual point of interest.
This cathedral, the actual St. Mere Eglise for which the town is named for, is famed for quite an unusual situation that happened here on D-Day. An American paratrooper dropping in had his chute caught on one of the church's spires, leaving him hanging from the rooftop by his harness. So he was hanging helplessly from this church, and eventually he got down amid all the combat, but in his honor a paratrooper mannequin hangs from the church to this day to illustrate what happened.
After taking photos of the dummy and the church, Dad and I shopped around a bit but there wasn't a lot there (Arromanches seems to be the new souvenir shop hotspot among the D-Day crowd) so we grabbed a beer at one of the nearby bars, in full view of the church.
After relaxing over a beer, we hopped in the car and made a bee line back to St. Vaast, where I got changed and we had dinner. Rabbit, sausages, and potato balls, and while we were out the girls got desserts so I claimed an éclair out of a pastry box.
It would be our last moment in St. Vaast for a couple of days, tomorrow we were to leave in the morning for Brittany! Mont St. Michel here we come!
UP NEXT: Who needs Ohio Renaissance Festival when you've got Brittany? Mont St. Michel, the town of Dinan that time forgot, and Jarrett majorly offends a French chef at the marche!
