at the sidewalk cafe
R and S at the cafe
Ellie picked all the flowers (weeds) she could find and put them on the soldiers graves.
There are over 9,000 American Soldiers buried here.
Today was just beautiful. We ate breakfast in the sun room of our B&B with 3 other couples, one from Canada, one from Australia and one from France. I could have listened to the Aussies talk all day! The food was so good the kids forgot to talk! After Drew Preston played chase with the dog for awhile we left for Omaha Beach. It was a pretty drive. We stopped first at Gold beach where British troops came it. It was chilling to see how far they had to come up the beach, go through the dunes and then scale a wall just to get to the Germans who would be shooting at them the whole time. We next went to the American Memorial and Cemetery at Omaha Beach. They have a fantastic visitor center (2 years old) that explained everything in just the right amount of time. I loved this comment, "They (the fallen soldiers) gave their collective future so we could have ours". The whole Operation Overlord was amazing. One new thing I learned is that the Allies sucessfully pulled off amazing bluff by tricking the Axis into thinking the landings would happen at Calais. They even had "phantom armies", life-sized blow-up tanks and boats and they parachuted dummies behind the lines that had simulated noise to sound like an invasion was taking place. All this totally baffled the enemy!
The cemetery itself was sobering. All those crosses representing all those young lives. The kids were moved. We found several graves of Alabama soldiers.
Next we went to Bayeux to see the tapestry. First we ate lunch at a sidewalk cafe. We had dessert this time. Dessert is extra yummy in France. 3 had ice cream, 2 had banana splits and I had "ile flottant" (floating island). It is meringne floating in custard. OOO LA LA
The Bayeux Tapestry was so cool. It is a 230 ft. by about 3 ft. long linen embroidery telling the story of the fight for the English Crown between Harold II and William the Conquerer in 1066. It's a great story. Look it up. We all enjoyed it.
Good news on the Roman front. We are going to head south in the am to Tours where we will go by the Chateau d'Usse (Sleeping Beauty Castle) and then on towards Nice. The next am we will continue to Nice where a shuttle will pick us up and take us into Italy to catch a train to Rome. Seems the south of France is having a rail strike (nice time to do that) and that's why we can't get a train from Paris to Rome. Oh well, we'll have an adventure!
By the way, Sully and Tucker were quite put out that I said they were probably beating the stew out of each other last nite. They said they had lots of stew left and didn't get in any fights. :)
We also went into a wal-mart type store today and bought some more jackets!!!!!!!
Praying for Beverly!
Praying for Ivy and Co. !
In our church up here, there was a gentleman about 90 years old who was in the third wave on D-Day in 1944. He didn't like to talk about it much, but I did get him to discuss it a little. He was a supply officer, so much of the worst shooting was over by the time he came ashore, but there were still lots of dead soldiers and broken equipment everywhere. He recently moved to be closer to his family, but it was an honor for me to have had a chance to talk to him about D-Day. Someday I'd intend to get to Omaha Beach myself.
ReplyDeleteJohn in Alaska