Noemi, Long Island Ken and the Normandy Beach Trip

Monday April 18^th

Today we took a day trip from Paris to the Normandy region in order to tour some of the D-Day beaches.  Setting up this trip was difficult from the start.  The beaches are not easy to access on your own unless you have a car.  There is no metro in Normandy and the invasion occurred over a broad area, leaving historical sites widely scattered.  Therefore, going up on the train and trying to make our way around on foot didn’t seem feasible.  I then toyed with the idea of renting a car, finding a hotel and making it a 2-3 day trip.  But Paul was only here for six days total, and spending three in Normandy didn’t seem reasonable. Plus the hassle of renting a car, driving to Normandy and finding all the sites on our own was just more than I really wanted to deal with.  So, despite my aversion to packaged tours, we decided the easiest way to see the beaches and American cemetery would be a packaged tour.  We arranged the tour with the same group here that runs the Segway tours, but in this case they are really just a middle man.  They got us our train tickets, provided a cursory sheet of information on how to get the right train, and gave us instruction to meet our tour guide in Bayeaux, Normandy.  This would be fine if everything went smoothly, but that was not to be the case.

We arrived at the train station, armed with our info sheet and confident with that due to our ultimate success on the trip to Brussels that we could figure this out.  However, several things started to conspire against us.  First, it was the start of Easter week, and as the schools are closed in Paris this week, many travelers were heading out of town.   The train station was an absolute mob scene.  The trains were all running 10-15 minutes late, and the sign board that posts departure tracks was malfunctioning.  This made it extremely difficult to figure out which train was which.  An announcement was made in French and the crowd that we were part of all started moving.  “Is that the right train?” Paul asked as we headed along with the crowd. “Not sure,” I replied, “But I’ll ask a conductor.”  Unfortunately as the mob approached the train, conductors were scarce and the one we found couldn’t speak English and pointed us to the train office.  Reluctantly we headed back to the office to ask if the train boarding was indeed our train.    After confirming that it was the correct train, we headed back, punched our tickets in the yellow ticket punching machine and tried to board.

We had second class seats, without a seat reservation, and valid to travel any day within a three month period.  This is a cheaper way to travel and what our package provided.  Instead of paying for a confirmed seat, you just take any empty seat.  If someone has a reservation for that seat, just move until you find one that isn’t reserved or taken.  This works very well in theory.  However, on extremely busy travel days and when you board late due to confusion with the train, it turns out that there are no more open seats.  Since the tickets are valid for three months, there is no way of knowing how many people will board the train on any given day or time.  Today the number of people boarding the train was “way too many”.  We couldn’t find any empty seats and the three of us ending up being smashed into the little compartment where you board the train with four other people and 60 bags of luggage for the two hour ride to Bayeaux.  Katie plopped down onto the floor and flopped over into an odd half sleeping position, looking more and more motion sick as the ride went on.  Paul had to stand, and I took a seat on the pile of luggage, which was teetering precipitously with a real danger of collapsing on Katie at any time.  I spent the two hours propping up and stabilizing the pile of luggage every time we sped around a corner.  Every time the conductor applied the brakes, the compartment filled with an acrid smell and Katie got greener.  This was quite the difference from our first class train ride to Brussels!  The ride could not be over soon enough, but each time I checked my watch only 10 or 15 minutes had passed.  After what seemed like five hours we crept into a station.  “Is this our stop?” Paul asked hopefully. I hopped off to find out, but alas it was Caen and not Bayeaux.  We reluctantly boarded again and rode another 20 minutes into Bayeax where we were relieved to detrain.  Unfortunately we could not relive ourselves as the train station had no facilities so we followed our map into town to wait for our tour guide.

We arrived at our meeting place at 12:40.  Our instructions said that the tour guide would meet us there between 12:50 and 1:00, so we settled back to wait. And wait.  And wait.  At 1:12, I handed off the info sheet to Paul telling him that we’d have to find a way to call the tour company and check to see if our guide was coming.  “Where’s your phone?” he asked me peevishly. “I left it in the apartment,” I said. “Where’s your phone?”  “Also in the apartment,” he admitted. “I thought you had your phone!”  In the spirit of Amazing Race where the travelers seem to find willing locals to share their cell phones at the drop of a hat he set out to find a phone.  Alas, we did not have a camera crew trailing us, which I am sure helps the Amazing Racers.  But as he turned the corner in search of a phone, an unmarked white van pulled up at the meeting place, and Noemi hopped out.

“I am Noemi,” she declared in heavily accented French, “Your tour guide for today.”  “Hello, I am Amy,” I replied, holding out my hand to shake hers.  “No, not Amy,” she said,  “It is Noemi, pronounced ‘No-Amy.’”  “And I am Amy,” I tried again, as Katie started laughing.  A few more rounds of this and we finally sorted out the names, and Amy and Noemi, along with Paul and Katie got back into the van. 

Already in the van we found some fellow Americans, a couple in their early 60s from Long Island with the manner and accent to match.  We stopped at a nearby hotel to pick up the rest of our group, an Indian couple from Kolkutta, fans of WWII movies.

We set off for our first stop, Pointe du Hoc.  Along the way we stopped to see the growing fields of rapeseed in full bloom, to observe some hedgerows up close, and to see many old manor houses from the 1600 and 1700s.  We learned that the people of the Norman region are descendants of the Saxons and the Vikings, and some of the their words, particularly those related to boats and fishing come from the Vikings.  This included the name of our first D-Day site, Pointe du Hoc. Hoc is a viking word meanign point, so it is Point of the Point.

Pointe du Hoc was a promontory point midway between the Utah and Omaha beach sites, manned by German soldiers with several large stationary rotating guns and German bunkers.  Luckily, since we still hadn’t had the chance to go to the bathroom, this site had facilities.  But as we got to the ladies room we saw that it was closed for cleaning. “THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” exclaimed the special education teacher from Long island. Since it seems like it takes up to 30 minutes to clean a public bathroom in France, I was inclined to agree.  Ken from Long island saved the day though.  “Come on in here,” he said gruffly opening the men’s room door.  “LADIES COMING IN!!!”  he shouted loudly in English, emphasizing the point by knocking loudly and repeatedly on each stall door. “ANYONE IN THERE?? LADIES COMING IN!” he shouted. Well, to be honest it may have been his normal level of speech, I’m not sure if he was shouting.  “ANYONE IN HERE???” he kept calling and knocking on a closed stall door.  “Yyyyyess,” came a tentative quavering voice.  “OK THEN - JUST KNOW LADIES COMING IN” he replied as we followed him in and quickly made use of the facilities.  After this scene, I wasn’t sure if Katie would come in or not, but she came willingly so I suspect she really had to go.

After finishing with the bathroom, Noemi gave us some background information on the site, including the fact that on D-Day the Germans had actually hid their big guns to protect them and had replicas in place.  They thought that this attack was a diversionary tactic and wanted to keep the guns safe for the true invasion.  Although most of the Norman countryside has been repaired, ploughed over and the bomb craters filled in, at Pointe du hoc, the bomb craters are intact.  The entire site is pockmarked wth craters up to 12 feet deep and 20 feet across.  “But where did all the dirt from the holes go?” asked Katie in wonderment looking around.  She was surprised to hear that much of it vaporized or drifted down evenly.  She kept expecting to see big piles of dirt as though a hole was dug and the dirt piled up next to it. 

Noemi wrapped up her speech and let us go to look around the site for 20 minutes.  Katie and I instantly clambered down into the nearest crater and looked back up at Paul on the surface.  All over the sites, parents and kids were climbing eagerly in and out of the huge holes, such a different scene from that of 70 years ago.  We also toured a German bunker, which looked extremely small from ground level and opened up into an amazing web of concrete rooms and tunnels underground.  “I feel like a hamster,” Katie observed as we made our way through it.

Our next stop was Omaha beach.  Noemi gave us the story of the beach invasion in her odd lilting French accented English which for some reason modulated up and down when giving tour information and then corrected itself when talking to us informally.  “So HERE YOU see the OMAHA beach SITE. Turning BEHIND YOU, you can see the GERMan PILLbox that PROTECTED the beach ACCESS from this END,” she would recite.  We were then free to walk on the beach, which was one of the widest beaches that I have ever seen. The sand was flat and it was low tide.  It was easily two (American) football fields out to the waves, and the beach was broken by rivelets of water a foot or more across running along it.  Since we didn’t want to make too much of a mess in Noemi’s van we abandoned out attempt to reach the  English channel after fording our third rivelet and being confronted with another about 3 feet across.  We did take some sand from a dry region for our beach collection and headed back to the van. 

We went into a little beach store for a snack and I was instantly confronted by Ken from Long Island. “SO WHAT DO YOU THINK,” he asked me, “WE SHOULD TIP TODAY RIGHT?  HOW MUCH ARE YOU GOING TO TIP HER? I’M NOT SURE ABOUT THESE FRENCH” “Ummmm,” I said stalling for time to let me get my bearings. “Yes, I do think it is appropriate to tip Noemi today, although tipping is not very common in France.”  “THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT,” Ken continued, “BUT I TIPPED A CABBIE 3 EUROS YESTERDAY ON A 12 EURO RIDE AND HE ABOUT PASSED OUT. SO WHAT DO YOU THINK TODAY – ABOUT 10 EUROS??”  “Ummm, yes, “ I said edging away.  “I think 10 is perfectly appropriate.”  “OK THEN. WE’LL EACH TIP TEN,” he confirmed.  As I walked outside the store a little shell shocked, Paul pulled me aside laughing. “Did Ken talk to you?” he asked. “He tried to ask me earlier and I told him I leave all that up to my wife.  He doesn’t want us to make him look bad by tipping more than him, so he wanted to coordinate tips.”  “Well we are all set now,” I confirmed.  “Next time a little warning, OK?”

We then headed to the American cemetery and visitor center where we were given an hour to explore.  Katie was really surprised to see all the displays about particular soldiers, which really humanized the face of the invasion. “How do they know who they all are?” she asked quietly.  It seems like ancient history to her, and the idea of knowing each individual soldier with his own story and background, when so many died, was mind-boggling to her.  We explained that each soldier was known and each wore ID tags for identification.  “But there’s so many,” she whispered as we exited the visitor center and entered the cemetery.  “It’s so wrong that so many people died.”  We had a long talk about bravery and just wars and stopping evil and all the innocent people like Anne Frank and her family that were praying for someone to stand up to Hitler and rescue them.  “These are those people,” I told her. “They died, but they died to stop evil and the world needs brave people to stand up for what is right.”  It’s a hard concept when killing and dying is such a concrete concept for an 11 year old.     

The day ended quietly and as we boarded our train back to Paris with fresh baguette sandwichs in hand, I was relieved that our biggest worry was finding comfortable seats, and not having to fight to the death for what is right, and as I settled back into the seat, I said a prayer for those who fought for us then, and those brave enough to do so today.