Narrative Expressions

La Cambe Visitor Center After we woke up and had breakfast in the hotel, we headed towards the German Military Cemetery of La Cambe near Bayeux. La Cambe is home to 1, 222 fallen soldiers, who fell between D-Day and Aug. 20, 1944, though there are more remains being found today. The average age of the men buried here were between 18 and 20 years old. The cemetery was well-hidden from the main highway, but there were "Freedom Trees" that were planted on the road leading up to the cemetery. The rows of tress are called the Garden of Peace .                 Entrance way into La Cambe. The cemetery had a nice visitor center, where it showcased some of the original wooden crosses. As we walked up to the entrance way that lead us to the cemetery, we noticed the stone wall, and the tall and thin entrance way.  Overall, cemetery was beautiful, but it was also very somber due to the black headstones that told you that there were at...

Our next stop was at Arromanches-les-Bains .   Arromanches is a quaint little town sitting on the banks of the English Channel.  The architecture of the town was amazing and the village was absolutely beautiful. We eventually made it through the narrow streets to arrive at the Arromanches D-Day Museum . Here we took a guided tour of the museum and learned that Arromanches was actually the center of the Normandy D-Day landings and was assigned the code name Gold Beach .  There were a total of five designated beached used on 6 June 1944 and each one was associated with British, American or Canadian military forces. Gold Beach was a British designated beach and units of the British 50th Infantry Division assault the beach and took it from German Troops on D-Day. Since Allied forces were not able to land at any of the other ports due to the German-occupied Europe along the Western European Coast during World War II. As a result, United Kingdom's Prime Minister Wins...

After we left Honfleur, we drove about an hour to the Pegasus Bridge Memorial, which lies near Benouville village.  The area near the bridge was part of Operation Deadstick, which was a major objective in the opening minutes of the invasion of Normandy. With Operation Deadstick, commander Major John Howard of the gliderborne unit of the British 6th Airborne Division, landed there on on 6 June 1944 to take the bridges from the Germans.  The most famous of those bridges  is now known as the Pegasus Bridge. The bridge was renamed afterwards in honor of the shoulder emblem that was worn by the British airborne forces, the flying horse, Pegasus. The bridge is unique as it is a subtype of a bascule bridge design, due to it not pivoting on a hinge point when becoming movable to allow for ships to pass through.  The engineering of this bridge allows the bridge to actually roll back on the curved tread plates attached to the girders of the main span, allowing for a wide...

We started our trip to Normandy on 08 June 2012 and we spent a total of three days learning about the Normandy Beach landings during World War II.  Besides the beach landings, Normandy is also famous for it's apple products, namely calvados , which is an apple brandy.   I love all things apples, so just being in an apple producing region is a plus in my book! Our first stop in France was in the maritime town of Honfluer, which is famous for being the starting point of Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain , who set sail in 1605 for the New World and eventually discovered Quebec. Honfluer is beautiful and quaint town that sits off the English Channel and the day that we visited, it was warm with a slight breeze.  Some of the sights that we visited were the an old Salt House, the old prison and the Church of Sainte Catherine. Now, Saint Catherine's Church was just amazing!  The church, built between the 15th and 16th centuries, is now surround by modern shop...