D-Day Beaches and Mont St. Michel

Monday I got my wish to visit some of the beaches in the landings on June 6, 1944. Pascal, my friend Sylvie's brother, offered to drive us there - about 1.5 hours each way. We started in Arromanches, which was the center of the action and where the artificial port was set up between the American troop landings to the west and the British and Canadian landings to the east. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by the expanse of the beaches by knowing the huge number involved in the landings but I was. And I only really saw Omaha beach. I did know I would be impressed by the American cemetery. I had seen so many pictures/documentaries. I hadn't realized it was right over Omaha beach. It makes sense, of course, that that's where they provisionally buried the dead from the D-Day fighting and days after that. Reading the grave markers does make it all come home. I found several who died on June 6 and one who died on August 18, the day after my father was killed in India. Then we went to the large Memorial museum in the nearby city of Caen.

On Tuesday we visited the iconic Mont St. Michel, the monastery built on rock once separated from the mainland by the tides. For years pilgrims risked their lives to get to the mount as the tides come in very fast and the sand sometime becomes quicksand and traps them. My favorite travel guide Rick Steves tried to warn me that the place is now completely overrun by tourists and to avoid being there between 11am and 4pm. But I didn't have a choice about the time as I was not driving. We did get there about 10 after a 3 hour drive and the lines were already starting to really grow. After parking on huge expanses on the mainland the tourists are whisked to 350 yards below the mount on free buses that just come one after the other all day long. I thought the island had always been a monastery but found as I did the audio guide tour that it had been a prison also for many years and had only relatively recently become a Benedictine monastery again. My tour took me to the church just as the noon mass was starting.  I would have liked to have stayed but I knew Pascal and Sylvie wanted to go. We escaped the throngs and ate in a quiet restaurant well away from the mount.