Day 6: Thursday June 9th

Today we went to a lovely little…okay maybe not so little, actually kind of huge, abbey. It is the Saint Michel abbey. The abbey was used a long time ago as a church and then in the 1800s as a prison, sort of like a fortress. It's this great big castle on top of a hill in the middle of a sea. All around it is sand and during certain seasons the sea actually rises enough to cover the parking lot. So they have all these pictures of of people walking across the water just so they can get to the abbey. It's completely crazy and gigantic. It took us 3 hours just to get through the main tour. It's really cool because the abbey was built and then slowly the village below came into existence. On the way in, it's lined with vendors and shops.  

Ze Abbey

Abbey Garden

Abbey streets

After we finished exploring the church and watching little kids below stomp on the sand/water on their way to the church, we headed to our car for our trusty lunch of baguettes, cheese, and salami. We ate that in the car on way back to the Normandy Museum that we went to yesterday. Dad dropped us off  at the museum and went to the nearest Avis to try and get them to fix the flat. While he was gone we spent the afternoon wandering through this GIGANTIC museum all about the French side of World War II. It was actually really cool to see the differences from how the US teaches about it, but it was so big that after about 1/2 of it, you can't  handle the reading anymore and you just give up. So we finished as much as we could and then sat in the cafe waiting for dad to come back. We had no communication with him so we just hoped he would come back for us.

Eventually he did. He told us that they had to switch us to a different car because they didn't have a way to fix the flat right away. So dad tried to grab all the belongings he could find, but he had no idea where we put it all and when he got to us we told him that he had left stuff in the car. So we had to go back to the agency and see if we could grab the stuff out of the car. BUT by the time we got there, someone had come to get the car and taken it to the garage to fix it. Also in this new car, the clutch was completely shot and it didn't have Gertrude the GPS or bluetooth hookup for the music. So my dad being the brilliant American that he is goes inside and starts asking the lady about getting our car back and trying to explain the clutch isn't working. By the time Kody went in to help with translating, the lady and my dad were in a heated argument. So finally the lady says "show me" and they come storming out. To give you an image of this lady. Think Ms Pillsbury off Glee with a French temperament and accent. So she didn't understand why the clutch wasn't working and when my dad tried to show her, she got so angry and was like "WHY ARE YOU DOING ZAT!? YOU WILL BREAK ZE CAR! VHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU STUPIDE AMERICAN!" Okay so maybe she didn't say the last part. But she did tell my dad to get out of the car and let her drive it. So my dad and this lady get in the car and start driving around the neighborhood and all you can see from the outside is this lady about to loose her head and my dad trying to understand what she is saying. Did I mention she was a ginger? So in the end she decided that we were stupid Americans that didn't know how to drive clutch and would break her car. To say the least we still had the new card and our 50 cent postcards were still in the glove box of our first car.  

So we just left the place after the lady goes storming into the office and went towards the D-Day memorial. Let me just start off by saying it has been my year for history. This year in school it was U.S. history and we studied pretty much everything. Right before spring break we had just learned about the Manhattan Project and can you guess where I went on spring break? Yep Los Alamos, New Mexico where the U.S. tested the first ever nuclear bomb that ended WWII.  So now..here I am in Europe…literally 6 weeks after I studied the D-Day landings visiting the very beaches in which it all occurred. Wanna know what else. The D-Day landing was June 6, 1944 and I am visiting it on June 9, 2011, 67 years after. It's like my teacher mentions a place in history and I'm like "obviously I'll be visiting that next time I have a holiday, I might even try to go ON the exact day in history". Oh I forgot to mention we had studied the Holocaust and in Normandy part of the museum was dedicated to the Holocaust. What can I say…I'm a history buff. 

At the memorial it was really cool. A lot of it you can't describe with words. It's just miles of white crosses dedicated to men who lost their lives on those beaches. We got there around closing so we witnessed the service in which they take the flag down for the night. They had the trumpet playing and the current soldiers folding it up and everything. They also have a little area where its basically a few statues and walls with things about the war. It was covered in flowers and banners because the locals had just had the D-Day festival of remembrance a few days earlier. They also have a section with all the names of the missing soldiers whose graves are unknown but they died somewhere on the beach. In the main part of the cemetery they have hundreds of crosses which say "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God". It really is just hard to explain the significance and feelings that you get at a place like this so I'll just show you the pictures I took. I recommend that everyone should try and go to some sort of war memorial or cemetery at least once in their life. It's truly amazing to see how many young men have given their lives for our beautiful country. I've been to a few military cemeteries and it's unforgettable. The image of the thousands of crosses will forever be a burned image in my mind. 

I few images of the flowers left over from the remembrance festival

Fountain with Crosses in background

The local kids wrote their thanks

The living and the dead

Inside this is a little chapel with murals on the ceiling that depict two soldiers. One  has been killed and an angel is taking him as an honored soldier to heaven. The other is a soldier in combat with an angel spreading her wings in protection.

Next we actually went to a place on the coast where the German soldiers had what they call batteries which were little bonkers about 5 miles off the coast with huge canons that they would fire at the American ships in the ocean. One of them had been hit pretty hard by a returning missile by the Americans and was fenced off. But the remaining ones just had a few dinks in the concrete barrier surrounding them and you could walk around in them. When you looked out toward the ocean you could imagine the battle that took place over 60 years ago. It was so amazing to just get that feel of a piece of history.

3D family photo

Finally we went down towards the water in a little town in which you could see the temporary yet permanent stations that the US navy had built in the ocean to be like a dock to place the giant battleships before the men would wade through to attack the beaches. These were the things that the Germans were firing at. We had been here 10 years ago and there used to be one that we could climb on and we took pictures on it. It's not there anymore. That piece of history has been washed away into the ocean's abyss. While I was there it was an amazing feeling to look out into the ocean and know that hundreds of men didn't even make it to the shoreline. They died in the ocean. Their graves unknown, somewhere near these temporary docking stations, that soon even time will erase. 

Best sibling photo ever.

Temporary station

After a few peaceful minutes of reminiscing we booked it back to the warmth of our car and drove home.