Europe, Day V

We ate breakfast in the hotel restaurant lit by a huge window looking out from Mont St. Michel onto the salt flats. The tide was out and the sky was as intensely white as I’d ever seen it. The concierge mentioned it was typical Channel weather for September which would only get worse. At least it seemed to drive away the usual stream of tourists.

By lunchtime we’d made it back north to Omaha Beach where it remained moody and overcast. Finding a “final” war-beach destination proved to be confusing. There was a small, unimpressive museum inside an aluminum quonset hut which we all agreed could not possibly be the official D-Day monument. We drove around for a bit longer before finding a parking lot alongside some sheer cliffs that resembled the sort of D-Day imagery you see in movies.

Not helping the authenticity was an extremely battered, deserted miniature golf course right down on the beach in front of a haunted-looking inn & restaurant. It was not the D-Day destination we imagined, but I can’t say the effort to go there was regrettable. After a standard-fare croque monsieur lunch, we climbed the side of a cliff to explore a German pillbox. I’d assumed there would be many more like it, or some more of-the-period historical signifiers, signs, monuments, anything. Other than a plaque or two, Omaha Beach was less the visual experience we’d anticipated until we found the American military cemetary.

The cemetary was back the way we came a mile, and up the coast a mile. It rained a little as we walked up a neatly manicured trail through some willow trees, following a small, quiet crowd of travelers. Through the entrance was a wide, brick semi-circle with inscriptions of soldier names like the Vietnam Memorial in DC. Wistar looked for, but could not find, the name of her relative who’d died during action in North France.

Further inside, there were two flag-draped monuments facing each other while music played from somewhere we couldn’t see. It resembled a plunking, Fender Rhodes piano playing songs from the 1940s. The really odd thing was, one of the pianos played melody while the other played bass, but one of them was at least a half-step out of key. This unnerving atonal music could be heard throughout the entire graveyard. You wanted to be respectful, but he music was making the hair on my neck stand up.

In front of us walked a young, retarded German couple with what appeared to be caretakers. The couple held hands and they both wore the kind of orange, leather Pumas you see on a lot of younger, stylish Europeans. It’s neither here nor there, just not something you see all the time.

Mid-afternoon, we drove down to Bayeux where the famous tapestry is located, but also the official D-Day Museum. We watched a movie that featured archive footage I’ve never seen on any of the typical WWII documentaries. The rest of the museum was really well designed. Each phase of the first two months of struggle into Nazi-held French territory was represented by life-size dioramas behind glass. Many of the uniforms, munitions, jeeps and bicycles I’d seen in books for years were right in front of me for the first time, accompanied by expertly designed signage detailing it all, making the idea of a tour guide obsolete. Which is good, because the only people working there appeared annoyed by us. I think it was because we arrived late for the movie and made a bit of a disturbance, bustling in, paying, and finding seats in the dark.

Back in Paris, it rained with a fury. Wistar and I grabbed umbrellas and left the apartment for a late dinner. We ended up at a gyro place that served chicken, cabbage, cucumber sauce and french fries all loaded down on a huge baguette.

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