The Horse Whisperer

Monday, August 16th

Today was a delightfully wonderful day, however, it didn't begin that way. We travelled from Berlin to Paris via overnight train...and although it was better than our last one...we did not have a good night's sleep. I have decided that I am too old for overnight trains. For future trips, I will just fly for long distances.

In Paris, we had to change train stations (not as easy as it sounds) just to get to even another Paris train station...does that make sense...to catch a train to Caen in Normandy. By the time we got to Caen around 11 am, we were exhausted! Fortunately, for this leg of our journey, we had arranged to rent a car. With GPS in hand, we were on our way to tour the D-Day battlefields.

Our first stop was supposed to be the Caen Memorial Museum. I set the GPS and it took us directly somewhere else. This is where serendipity stepped in once again...for the somewhere the GPS sent us was none other than the ruins of William the Conquerer's castle! I am a huge English history buff, so this was incredible to me. We walked around and then went and had some lunch. We decided to skip the museum as the guys were getting museum'd out.

Next, we drove to Arromanches. Driving ourselves was such a treat. We loved seeing all the little villages and the gorgeous countryside. We really needed this break from cities.

In Arromanches, we saw the harbor built by the British after the D-Day invasion and watched a film about the invasion in a 360 degree theater. The film was quite moving even without one word spoken. I wondered how I was going to emotionally handle all of these sights when I was already crying at the first one!

As we walked back to the car, we saw horses in a pasture. I made a clicking noise (Matt claims to have clicked first) to see if they would respond and they practically ran over to us. It was truly a sweet moment. I'm obviously so good with horses...why won't Mike let me have one?

We left Arromanches and drove to Longues-sur-Mer to see some German gun batteries that were still pretty much intact. Matt really enjoyed exploring the area...let's be honest, so did Mike. We were a little disappointed at how disrespectful some of the visitors were behaving. Men died on the very ground we were standing on, hallowed ground, and that fact was never lost on us throughout our visit to Normandy.

View from a German bunker out
to the English Channel.

By that time is was already 5 pm and we decided to head to our accommodations, a small cottage (called a gite) in the town of Saint Jores. The GPS took us the right way, but I thought I was smarter than it and had Mike turn around. We ended up pulling over and calling our kind British host, who told us to stay put and drove to us and led us back...how sweet is that?!

In our rustic, quaint, creaky old gite...we had the best night's sleep yet.