D-Day Beaches

We're finally at another hostel with internet...so here's the next installment of our journey:

After Turkey, we traveled the next leg via car with 5.5 of our good friends. The 3 Wiggies, the 2.5 Lewises, and the 2 Ellises jammed into a car and drove from England to Normandy, France via a ferry across the channel.
Actually getting to the ferry was quite an ordeal... it involved missed trains, lots of traffic, picking up Rob at a random train station, getting lost, and a delayed ferry. So obviously, we were pretty happy to finally be on the right track.

A view of the white cliffs of Dover from our ferry

After we made it across the channel we had to drive through some late-night hail storms, figure out how to get into our locked hotel building (which required a miraculous encounter with a random Portuguese security-guard), before finally getting to bed by 3 am.

But the next morning we woke up to see blue skies and the beautiful beaches of Normandy. It was totally worth it.

Omaha Beach, site of some of the fiercest fighting on D-Day

We did some exploring of the hills overlooking the beach and crawled into an old WWII bunker. I experienced minor claustrophobia, which made me very glad I didn't have to sit in there day after day, waiting for an invasion.

We also visited the nearby Pointe du Hoc, a cliff enclosed outcropping that overlooked both Omaha and Utah beaches. The Germans had stationed artillery in this key defensive stronghold, and so it became an important US point of attack on D-Day. Colonel James Rudder led 226 U.S. Rangers on a daring climb up the sheer cliff faces to take the position. After seizing the cliffs and repelling multiple counter-offensives, only 90 men remained of the initial 226. (Allied ships and planes gave the Rangers cover by bombarding the cliffs, and now you can still see the humongous craters).

Heather is 6' tall...so those were big craters

On our way to the American Cemetery, Verlan and Rob decided to get some first-hand experience storming the beaches of Normandy....they shed some clothing, ran into the freeeezing water, and then tried to sprint back up the beach. It was sobering for Rob to imagine running that whole way while being mowed down by machine gun fire.

Then we got to the best part of the day. The American Cemetery was extremely moving; rows and rows of white marble crosses overlooking the beaches the soldiers died to win. The museum discussed some of the individual life stories of these heroes, many of whom were just teenagers with bright futures and loving families, and paid the ultimate sacrifice to secure a few meters of land half a world away.