Day 3: D-Day Tour

We woke up reeeeeeally early Saturday morning so we would have time to take the metro to the train station, print out our tickets, and get something for breakfast before our train left at 7:45. It was about a 2 hour train ride so we got there at about 9:50 and met up with our tour guide and the rest of the group. It turns out that 3 of the other group members are from Houston and Austin and one of them works as a coach at Round Rock High School! We never did get their names though. It was two men and a woman. I couldn't quite figure out how they were related. They two guys didn't really look like brothers and you could tell the woman was older than them but she didn't look old enough to be their mom. Oh well, they were nice. :)

After everyone we were waiting for found our guide, we took a bus from the train station to the museum to start the tour.

The Caen Memorial. The museum starts with the time period just after WWI and continues until after WWII.

The museum was really big and the tour guide led us through it so we weren't actually able to see all of it. It was interesting to go through it with her though, because she was able to highlight the most important points but still give us all the information without having to read everything. We spent the whole morning at the museum, had lunch, and then went to different areas along the coast that were significant on D-Day.

Photos from WWI. The tour guide talked about how the fighting style was so different in the two wars.

Before the war even started, Hitler had started taking over more and more land surrounding Germany. Hitler's invasion of Poland was what triggered the start of the war.

Hitler's propaganda started with young children and continued through adulthood. The cards would be sold in cigarette boxes and the buyer would then give them to their children. Hitler's book was given to young couples after they were married. With all his propaganda it's easy to see why so many people blindly believed whatever he told them.

This is a U.S. Sherman Tank. It had to be modified in certain parts of France because of the hedgerows. They had to add blades to the front to cut through the dense trees and hedges.

After going through the museum we watched a 15 minute video showing actual footage of Allied soldiers getting ready to attack the beach and German soldiers preparing to be attacked as soon as they saw what was coming. 

After the video, it was time for lunch. We had 3 options; steak, duck, and fish. I chose the duck and Daniel chose the steak. The duck was really good although the potatoes that came with it had a strange tasting sauce on them. Daniel's steak was really fatty and most of it was inedible, but the french fries that came with it were really good.

Our first stop on the landing beach portion of the tour was near a town called Arromanches. This is where Gold Beach was located. Gold Beach was assigned to the British on D-Day. After they had taken command of the beach and surrounding areas they built an artificial harbor. There was also an artificial harbor built at Omaha Beach but it was completely destroyed by a storm. The harbor at Gold Beach was badly damaged but they were able to fix it for use.

You can see what's left of the artificial harbor in the water.

We were up on a ridge but this is the town of Arromanches and the beach in front of it. There was also a small town to the right of this ridge that was part of Gold Beach.

This is a portion of a floating roadway. There would be many of these linked together to allow cars to travel onto land regardless of the tide.

Our next stop was at a location where German gun batteries can still be seen. I was really surprised at how good of shape they were in, especially because people are allowed to walk through them. I wonder if they have to clean graffiti off regularly. I hope not, but I'm often surprised by how disrespectful people can be to meaningful landmarks.

A German gun battery. The guns in all of these are the original ones from WWII.

The inside of the gun. It's really rusty and kind of banged up. You can see a hole from where an Allied shot got through.

This is where they would store the artillery. There would have been 10 to 12 soldiers in each one of these. Our tour guide told us all of them went deaf from firing the gun so often. Apparently doctors told them to cover their ears to try to prevent hearing loss but the guns were so loud that didn't really make a difference.

This is a badly damaged gun battery. The others are actually in really good condition. According to our tour guide the Germans had forced Polish soldiers and French prisoners to build the gun batteries. They would try to sabotage them by not mixing the concrete correctly or using sugar instead of sand which made them much more vulnerable.

This is the same gun battery as the picture above but from the inside. You can see the steel they used to make them even stronger.

It's hard to see but at the very edge of the land, in the middle, there is a concrete roof. This wasn't another gun battery, it was a command post. The actual gun batteries were pretty far inland so they couldn't see where to shoot. People in the command posts would radio coordinates for the gun batteries to shoot at.

Two more gun batteries off in the distance. There were four total and they could be used to defend both Gold Beach (to the right) and Omaha Beach (to the left).

Our next stop was at the American Cemetery in Colleville Sur Mer. The Cemetery is located just above Omaha Beach and is the resting place of almost 10,000 soldiers who died in the Normandy campaign. The crosses and Stars of David are made of marble and are arranged so that they are in straight lines horizontally, vertically, and diagonally. There is also a memorial to about 1,500 missing soldiers and a chapel. The whole site was just amazing to see. It was so beautiful and really made you realize the amazing sacrifice that was made to ensure freedom. There are also two statues at the far end of the cemetery depicting America and France. 

Part of the memorial to the missing soldiers. The states next to their names represent the location of where they joined the army, not necessarily where they were from. There were a few soldiers identified after this was made and their names are denoted by a small bronze rosette. There are only 12 out of over 1,500.

Another part of the memorial that shows the military operations in Western Europe.

A statue called "Spirit of American Youth." The average age of the soldiers who died was only 22.

The reflecting pool. You can also see some of the crosses and the chapel in the distance.

Omaha Beach from the cemetery.

This display shows all the beaches that were attacked on D-Day.

The crosses are lined up vertically, horizontally, and diagonally.

The soldiers who had the Star of David on their dog tags received these headstones rather than the crosses. There may have been more Jewish soldiers buried here, however, they must have decided not to denote that on their dog tags in case they were captured.

There were several crosses with this inscription. I suppose the name of this soldier might be up on the wall in the memorial but they weren't able to identify his body.

I can't remember exactly what each of these scenes represents but it has something to do with France showing their gratitude to the United States for helping free them from the Germans.

If families are not able to make it to put flowers on the graves, they often have someone from the cemetery do it. They get sand from the beach and rub it on the headstone so the name stands out. Then they take a picture and send it to the family.

I think the American Cemetery was my favorite part of the whole tour. The gun batteries were really neat to see as well, but this was much more moving. There were many more than 10,000 that died during the Normandy campaign but a lot of families decided to have their soldiers brought home to be buried. I believe the statistic was about 60% were brought home.

You can get to Omaha Beach from the American Cemetery but that was one of the stops we planned on making with the tour guide. This meant we didn't have to climb lots of stairs up and down :). I had had enough stairs after the Arc de Triomphe hehe. Along the way, we saw the crazy hedgerows the Americans had to get through to liberate the towns further inland. Like I mentioned earlier, they had to modify their tanks to be able to cut down the trees and bushes.

Some hedgerows along the roads. They also had hedgerows to separate fields so the soldiers had to go through a lot of them.

Omaha Beach. The plan was to go in at mid-tide so they wouldn't have so much beach to cover. At high tide the water comes all the way up to the rocks, visible at the edge of this picture. If they went in at high tide they wouldn't be able to avoid all the stumbling blocks the Germans had placed on the beach.

More of Omaha Beach. It's used as a regular beach today. Our tour guide told us that a lot of soldiers didn't want it blocked off because the whole point of them coming there to fight was for freedom.

You can see the terrain the soldiers had to cover once they landed on the beach. Imagine having to climb up that during heavy fire from the Germans in front of you and your own side from the back trying to give covering fire. Plus, as soon as they made it to the top, they would be met with fields and hedgerows to get through.

Our last stop before heading back to the train station was Pointe du Hoc. Pointe du Hoc is a ridge located between Omaha and Utah Beaches. The Allies believed that there were guns along this ridge that could be used to thwart their efforts to take over the beaches. They decided to send American Army Rangers to scale the cliffs leading up to the ridge and take out the guns. The Rangers actually ended up reaching the coast at the wrong spot, so they had to navigate along the coastline to reach their intended destination. It took them about 40 minutes to do so, giving the Germans time to see that they were coming. They had to scale the cliffs during heavy fire from the Germans and many Rangers were lost just getting to the top. What they didn't anticipate was finding fake guns in the gun batteries. The real guns had been moved somewhere else. The gun batteries are still there as well as lots of craters made by naval bombardment.

You can see one of the craters made by the bombings.

More craters and some remnants of German gun batteries.

A very badly damaged gun battery.

A view of the cliffs the Rangers had to scale.

This is one of the command posts that I mentioned earlier. There was just a small slit for soldiers to see out of. This has been turned into a memorial for the American Rangers.

This is a natural landmark that the Rangers used to find their location. When they didn't see this at first, they realized they were in the wrong place.

The inscription on the memorial honoring the American Rangers.

The memorial.

An overview of the land with all the craters in it. I wish we could have gotten higher to take a better aerial view.

After this we had about an hour long drive back to the train station. Everyone on the tour was so tired and I think almost all of us fell asleep at some point on the drive back. Daniel and I were sitting up front but I turned around once and saw lots of closed eyes, hehe. It was a wonderful tour and we had a really good guide. She did a great job of making it interesting for people with a lot of knowledge about the landings, like Daniel, and those with less, like me. I'm sure we'll come back another time to see more inland battle sites of WWII. When we got back to Paris we were exhausted and had another busy day planned for Sunday, The Louvre! Check back tomorrow for my last post about Paris.

Thoughts and prayers for Daniel would be greatly appreciated as he is having a hard time with his GERD and has now come down with a cold or flu. He's been really frustrated with his health issues the past few months so please pray that it will pass quickly, or at least come to a manageable state, so he can enjoy our stay in Europe. 

We love and miss you all!

Janelle

Paris Day 2!

Friday morning we woke up early and took the RER-C line out to Versailles. We wanted to get there pretty close to when it opened so we could see it and still make it back to the city to see Notre Dame as well. It was about a 30 minute train ride out there and it was really crowded the first couple of stops when we were still in the city. We figured most of the businesses must have been just on the outskirts because almost every (at least all the people in professional attire) got off at the same stop.

We had a little bit of a walk from the train station to the palace but it was really neat to see it as we walked up.

The gates and front of the Palace were covered in gold. It was really beautiful even though it was foggy.

Versailles used to be a small town outside of Paris. There was a royal hunting lodge that Louis XIV decided to turn into a palace. Louis XIV started building onto it in 1664 and enlargements and renovations continued during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI. King Louis Phillipe decided to turn it into a museum in 1837. A lot of the furniture had actually been sold but they were able to get a lot of it back to display. I took a gazillion pictures on our guided tour and when we went through the self-tour areas so I'll just put a few that I think are really neat.

Here are some of the photos from the guided tour.

A really fancy Barometer. I think she said that it is actually in working order but the face was replaced with a fake one.

There were tons of beautiful fireplaces throughout the private rooms.

A really nice roll top desk. The detailed inlaid wood was crazy.

A plush toilet, hehe. It would be nice to sit on I guess but what if one of the guys missed?

The ceilings were really ornately decorated. I imagine its all gold plated.

This was paneling from a music room.

A library. All the books were the original books used by one of the kings.

There was an opera house inside the palace. I think it is actually used today but only a few times a year. The chandeliers on the second balcony in this photo are only half chandeliers mounted on mirrors. It's hard to tell in this picture but it made it look like the opera house was much bigger than it really was.

After we finished our guided tour, which was neat to see but not necessarily to listen to (she was hard to understand and gave way too much info), we went through the rest of the palace that is open for self-guided tours.

I think this is a chapel. It's really pretty whatever it is, hehe.

These rooms were even more ornate with the gold, fabric on the walls, marble, and painted ceilings.

The Hall of Mirrors. They should put a step stool or little platform near the entrance to the hall so you can get above all the people to take a good picture. The chandeliers in this room aren't original. When we saw some of the chandeliers in the private rooms our tour guide told us the ones in the Hall of Mirrors were replaced in the late 80's or early 90's.

Some of the mirrors.

A really old bed. I don't know that I would be able to sleep closed in there.

The ceiling above the bed in the photo before this. You can see the top of the bed at the very bottom of the picture. It had these feathery ruffs on each corner. I wouldn't want to be the one dusting those.

The gardens.

If you look closely at the little trees you can see they're sculpted in different patterns.

The gardens go on forever and forever. It was already almost 1 o'clock and we were pretty hungry so we didn't have as much time as we would have liked to really explore the gardens. Plus it was cold. :)

It turned out to be a good thing we didn't explore the gardens more. As we were getting lunch just outside the train station it started raining. Luckily by the time we got back into the city it wasn't raining there. Our next stop was Notre Dame. The metro stop we used to get to Notre Dame was called Cite. It is one of the few original metro entrances still there.

There was a really cool sign at the entrance. We noticed a few others like these throughout our trip.

Cathedrals and churches and palaces that are so old yet so ornate and large and high just amaze me. Imagine what it took to build them when they didn't have the same equipment we have now. That's probably why it always took so long to finish everything. Notre Dame was started in 1163 and finished in 1345.

I love the Christmas Tree out front.

The front doors. It's hard to see in this picture but just under Jesus (I'm assuming the guy sitting on the throne is Jesus) is an angel and a devil. The devil is pretty creepy looking.

We weren't allowed to use flash inside so some of the pictures aren't that great. Also, our camera ran out of battery so we had to start using my phone to take the pictures. *Daniel informed me that I didn't mention how I forgot the memory card for the camera. When I went to take that first picture on yesterday's blog the camera had a warning message. I turned to Daniel and said "uh oh." We were able to get another card that night at a store called Fnac (weird name huh!) on the Champs Elysees.*

You can see the pillars and the high vaulted ceilings. It just amazes me how this was built.

The famous rosette stained glass windows.

These scenes were along both sides of the high altar. They represent the appearances of the risen Christ.

They had these little chapels all along both sides of the church. They were all dedicated to different saints.

A chandelier called the Crown of Light.

They had a giant nativity scene set up. Of course baby Jesus isn't in the manger yet. I imagine they'll have some sort of ceremony on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day where they place him in the manger.

The High Altar in the center of the Cathedral. If you imagine a cross in the center this would be the top part of the cross.

This was on the ceiling in the center of the church. It's a mosaic of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus.

Just another picture showing how amazing the architecture is.

The back of Notre Dame.

This is one of the towers in the middle of the cathedral. Those bluish figures are statues of men. I couldn't zoom in far enough on my phone to see what they were doing.

We decided not to go into the Treasury (where they crown of thorns is held) or up the tower because we still wanted to do so much and it was already around 3 o'clock. We headed farther west on the island to try to Sainte-Chapelle which was built by Louis IX in the mid 1200's to house his collection of Passion Relics, including the crown of thorns which is now at Notre Dame. It was recommended, along with the Conciergerie (an old palace and prison) in our Europe guidebook. When we got there the line was really long and we were worried we wouldn't be able to get in before it closed. It closed at 5 but the last entrance was at 4 or 4:30. We decided to see about the Conciergerie. We weren't really sure where it was so we ended up walking halfway around the island to realize it was on the same street as the entrance to Sainte-Chapelle, just a little bit further down.

Once we finally made it inside, we quickly realized it may have been a waste of money. The Conciergerie is a former royal palace and prison from the 10th to the 14th centuries. The entrance is into the Hall of Men-at-Arms which is a giant hall with high vaulted ceilings. It would have been pretty neat to look at but there was an art show on display that was really really really weird. I could have put like 10 more reallys in there. It was based on animals but I don't even know where to begin to describe it after that. We saw a sculpture of horse made out of what looked like horse hide stitched together. There was also a bare tree with dead snakes hanging from it (I'm not sure if they were real or not but I definitely didn't get close enough to find out). In hindsight we should have taken pictures just so we could have showed everyone how weird it was but at the time we were kind of freaked out. Anyways, this is where Marie Antoinette was held before she was executed. Here are some pictures.

This is a fragment of a black marble table used during receptions held by the Capetian monarchy.

The spiral staircase that used to lead up to another hall that has since been destroyed.

A reenactment of what a prison cell would have looked like for people who had money. They could buy themselves better accommodations.

This window is in Marie Antoinette's Chapel which was built in 1815. They have an example of what her cell may have looked like as well. It was actually pretty nice for a prison cell.

This is the Women's Courtyard. In the back there is a table where they used to eat, a fountain where they would wash their clothes, and a smaller holding cell called the corner of last goodbyes. They would wait there for the cart that would take them to the scaffold for their executions.

The Conciergerie did get better as soon as we passed the crazy art exhibit but it still wasn't quite worth the amount we had to pay. They have joint tickets for Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie but it was already too late in the day to get those. Next we headed to the Deportation Memorial which was in memory of the french who were sent to concentration camps during WWII. According to the guidebook it was open until 7 so we weren't really in a hurry to get there. When we arrived we saw a sign saying it closed at 5. It was only 4:50 but they must have decided to close early that day because we couldn't go down into the actual memorial. We could only see part of the garden right before it. As we were leaving to go to the Eiffel Tower we walked across a bridge that had a ton of locks on the railing.

When we looked closer we could see that couples had written their names or initials on the locks along with hearts and dates. I think they must put the lock on the railing and then throw the key into the river below to symbolize their everlasting love.

We got to the Eiffel Tower at about 5:15. It was already getting kind of dark so the tower was lit.

We took this picture as we walked up to it from the metro stop. The camera was out of battery and night pictures with my phone aren't the best.

The underside of the tower. You can see one of the legs where you can take an elevator up.

When we got there we had to get in line for tickets. There was a long line at one of the entrances so we went to go get in it. When we got there, an employee directed us to a line that was starting at another entrance. We had to wait until 6 before they even started having people move through security and then buy the tickets. Then you had to wait in line to go up the elevator. Luckily we were kind of close to the beginning so we were able to get right on an elevator after buying our tickets. As soon as we stepped outside we realized it was much colder up there than on the ground. A lot windier too! Here are some pictures.

Daniel and I at the top of the Eiffel Tower!

The Champs Elysees. You can also see the search light from the tower itself.

I'm not sure what this is called but there's a long grassy area leading away from one side of the Eiffel Tower. This is the best place to get pictures of the tower from the ground.

The Seine River from the top of the tower.

As we were going down the elevator the tower started sparkling. It does this on the hour every hour for 5 minutes at night. I took this picture just after we exited.

So pretty all lit up at night.

We wanted to get pictures of us standing in front of the Eiffel Tower but it didn't really work at night. I think I might actually be in that picture above but it's too hard to see. We decided to go back  during daylight hours to take pictures of us. This picture was actually taken on Sunday because we had the D-Day Tour on Saturday.

Us in front of the Eiffel Tower! It was overcast but at least it wasn't foggy. Most of the time we were there it was so foggy that you couldn't even see the top of the tower.

After leaving the Eiffel Tower Friday night we had dinner and then went back to the hotel room. We had to get up at 5 o'clock the next morning to make it to the train station in time for our D-Day Tour. I'll definitely have Daniel proof-read my post about it since that is his area of expertise.

On a topic not related to Paris, I made the sugar cookie bars again yesterday and let them bake longer. It seemed done and was even more brown on top. However, when Daniel cut into it still wasn't cooked in the middle. I guess I'll have to wait to try that one again until I get back to the states. Still hoping to make an apple pie this week though, we'll see how that goes, lol.

I started this post last night but it got pretty late before I could finish it. I'll still post again today about the D-Day tour so maybe you'll get to read two in one day!

Bye!