Friday, August 24, 2007

Normandy - D Day Tour

Since we last made an entry on the blog we have moved from Brugge to Bayeux. This was an amazing adventure.

Firstly we had to find what trains to get. This involved us getting a few transfers along the way. We successfully started to work out the Begium train system by “winging” our way through French. We then arrived in Paris, where we had to use the “metro” to transfer to another station. We were a little worried about this so our plan was to go to an information booth in hope that they spoke English. We we got of the train to move to the info booth, the line was about 30 deep with tourists. We only had 40 mins at to make our transfer or else we would miss our train to Bayeux and there for miss the Normandy tour.....that was not an option, so we sucked it up, read the metro chart the way we thought it worked, bought a ticket and BINGO, we made it. We caught first class trains and can i just say ....wow, food and drinks all the way, very nice indeed. We made it to Bayeux refreshed, fed and ready to go......that was until we tried to catch the local bus service to a closer location to our hotel. No one spoke any English, not even enough for us to get pass “bon jour”. After two attempts with different bus drivers, we decided the only way we were going to make it before dark was to walk it. It was 3 kms with full packs, windy, chilly and Nicole with her cold/flu/cough thing. We made it and made it in great time. Nicole has really been showing that she is putting her all in and then some, as this is our once in a life time tour....no time for the rest or wicked.

Today was the day for the Normandy tour. We had both been looking forward to this since we found it. Again with the tour it was a great way to be able to see all of the spots that we had heard, read and seen about quickly. We could have easily spent 4 weeks here doing it ourselves, but that was not the type of holiday we were on.

The tour was great and did go to all the right spots. The guide was good, but not as good as our previous guide in Ieper. I think we may have been spoilt there, but we were expecting a little more out of this guy.
We did learn a heap of things that we did not know and also taught not to believe everything you see on “Saving Private Ryan” and even “Band Of Brothers” or though they are pretty good representations.

The weather unfortunately was not very good for us, as it was cold, windy and even raining during parts of the day, but this did however give us a more realistic point of view how it was on D Day for the guys. As one of the stories we did learn was that D Day was meant to be the 5th June 1944 but was postponed due to weather and then given the green light on the 6th even though weather had not improved.

We took a heap of photos even though they did not turn out as good as i had hoped, because of the sky, they do however mean a lot to Nicole and I as we know have a full idea of how it really looks over here in Normandy

Hope all is still well over there for everyone.We are missing you heaps.

PS – tell puff he does not have to wait for us.
PPS – sorry for the heaps of photos today :)

Nous partons demain
The Crouch Travellers

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