Normandy

So, Kendra and I hopped on a train Friday morning, bound for Caen. I'm guessing most people in the U.S. haven't ever heard of Caen, or most of the little towns along the coast in Normandy, but they know all about us. All of them were under German control up until 1944 when the Allies stormed the beaches and started the bombardments. I never realized how much suffering and destruction those French villagers experienced. Our men went through hell too, running across open beaches under enemy fire, parachuting into enemy territory, and climbing up cliffs only to be sniped down. But can you imagine living under German oppression, only to be freed by having your entire town and way of life bombed into nothingness? Towns like Saint Lô basically didn't *exist* anymore at the end of Allied bombing. The photos show nothing but debris and parts of what used to be houses. When our forces finally took possession of those towns, one by one, they were welcomed by the French, of course, but with somberness. They accepted that their freedom would come at a price, and were grateful to have it nonetheless, but that couldn't take away the pain of their loss. How blessed we have been to have not experienced this kind of sacrifice.

I've always heard that something happens, something changes inside, when you see the white crosses at the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer. It's true. There's something so real about seeing 9,000 white crosses stretching as far as you can see, understanding just how many lives they represent, and realizing that even that number is only a fraction of how many lives were actually sacrificed. Those 9,000 are only 39% of the casualty total; the rest were taken home. I just couldn't manage to imagine what it must have been like on the Beach down below the cemetery 66 years ago. Bloody Omaha, they call it, because 3,000 American men fell that morning as they stormed the beach. It was so beautiful yesterday. Blue skies and sunshine, cheerful birdsongs floating on the soft, cool breeze -- how could it be the site of a massacre? They were all just fathers and sons and brothers. I have no sympathy for the German cause, nor do I in any way condone its horrors, but I do grieve for the loss of life on all sides. The wages of sin...

I will always remember meeting Bob at the cemetery. Bob is a D-Day veteran with a Scottish accent and a soldier's eye for pretty girls. I walked up to him and his comrade at the Gold Beach bunkers to shake their hands and thank them for their sacrifice, and he stopped to talk to us when we met again at the American cemetery with his friends calling out, "Come on Bob, not again, Bob!" He told us that he was in the parachute division on D-Day and he was only 19 when he jumped out of that plane over Saint-Mère-Église. "I wasn't frightened," he said. "No?" we both gasped. "Nope. I was scared stiff." I can't imagine. "I couldn't have been much older than you girls," he ventured.
"What are you, 16?"
"21, actually."
"Nawww!"
He wondered why in the world young people like us would be interested in coming to Normandy, and I realized that most of the people around us really weren't our age. I shrugged. "We care about what happened. I wish more people did." If they did, they wouldn't miss out on meeting men like Bob. They might even see some of them show off the magic tricks they learned during all those hours in the barracks. He was still pulling coins out of nowhere for us when our tour guide found us, and we realized that we'd lost track of time and were late for our rendez-vous back at the touring bus. Oops. It was worth it, though. I have a picture of us together so I won't forget him. Thank you, Bob, for everything.

Our tour of the Gold Beach, Omaha Beach, and Pointe du Hoc wouldn't have been the same without the great tour group we were with. Kendra and I hit it off with an older couple named Sue and Tom, who are from Oklahoma but have living in Belgium for the past few years. (What are the odds? It was like us meeting the girl from Little Rock on the tour of the chateaus who lives in a neighborhood right next to Kendra's family. 0_o) Sue was just like a Southern grandma and took good care of us, even though we'd hardly met. :) We all giggled when we drove past one of the d-day weekend barbecues going on and realized they were grilling bratwurst and serving it with sauerkraut. They must have been digging into those German food reserves they captured... ;)

Our hotel was really more like a hostel with a TV, but I was able to take my first bath in 5 months, and we watched some World Cup soccer and Get Smart in French. We ate dry muesli out of plastic hotel cups for breakfast. It was awesome. ;) We took off Friday night to explore the town a little and get dinner, and it turned out that the castle was free to explore. So we took goofy pictures with the statues inside the walls and climbed up onto the ramparts and took pictures of the sunset. It was starting to get dark, so we decided to head back to the hotel; unfortunately, we couldn't find the bus line back. We finally figured out how to get to the right stop, and when we got there we found out we had a 55 minute wait for the last bus back. :P That's right. Thank you French public transit system. As much as they love to go out and hang out in town at night, there's never an easy way to get back home for us tourists. I wanted to just sit down on the sidewalk and throw a temper tantrum and cry. I'm so weary of feeling stranded and scared that I'm going to be stuck on a dark street somewhere, even though I tried my best to get home. But...we made the best of it and took more goofy pictures of ourselves at the bus stop. You can see the evidence on Facebook (fortunately or not). lol

Oh, and here's a Kendra quote of the trip: "The world, it's so BIG, Grace, so big!"

It's true. It's just so big...

I've seen so much here, but it's only the very tiniest tip of the iceberg!!