Normandy: Exploring the Wars

The wall of the Norman fort in Caen

We continued our adventures with my parents, heading out of Paris on a Sunday morning.

Juno beach was peaceful when we made our pilgrimage on a late May afternoon. We'd stayed in Caen the night before and made the short drive to the coast. The sand was bright and inviting, shifting gently in the Atlantic breezes.

Although the image of absolute chaos, of bodies strewn over the beach while bullets and shells flew overhead is difficult to place in this now quiet and pretty stretch of beach, the reminders are everywhere. The sand is slowly covering the big, squat German bunkers that line the whole coast, but these imposing structures are easy to find and explore. Tanks and big guns now form memorials to the soldiers who struggled up the beach to liberate Normandy.

Sunken bunker near Juno Beach

We took a tour at the Juno Beach Centre led by a Canadian history student through the nearest bunker and down onto the beach, and spent an hour in the extensive museum.

We went down the coast and found the remains of the Mulligan harbour, which my Dad swam out to touch in the eighties, and wandered around a coastal battery. We found the small town where the 1st Hussars, his regiment since the 70s, was decimated a week after the landings in the push towards Caen, and we finished the day at a Canadian war cemetary - incredibly well kept and beautiful.

And that was the easy day, history-wise.

You want to know what kind of tank this is?
I have no idea. You can ask my dad though.
He's a tank savant. He drives them, he loves them,
he will tell you all about them -
whether or not you are pretending to listen.
Dad, you're the best.
Sorry I'm bad at listening about the tanks.
Update: he says it's a Churchill.

We had an easy night - kebab for dinner, my Mom's new favourite food, and after a game of euchre (so nice to play something other than rummy!) we went to bed early.

The next morning we took off north from Caen for a veritable scavenger hunt of war sites. First to Dieppe, just up the coast, to stand in the wind under the huge, steep cliffs, and to see the slippery stone beach where so many Canadian soldiers died in a botched raid in 1942.

We found the British WWI cemetery in Boulogne sur Mer on a mission to find the grave of Edward Hunter, Grandfather of family friend Carol, and then after stopping to admire the white cliffs across the English Channel, we drove on to Dunkirk to see the beach from which the British evacuated in 1940.

Tired, but determined  we drove south from Dunkirk to Vimy. As you approach the town, the Canadian war monument is visible on the ridge for kilometres, its freshly restored white marble easy to pick out among the forests surrounding it.

We barely made the last tour of the site, led again by a Canadian student. I'm glad we did - its the only way down into the tunnels. We toured through a tunnel (one of a massive complex) and saw a few rooms, and returned to the surface through the exit used on the day the battle began, where the soldiers stood nervous and primed for combat.

We wandered the reconstructed trenches until the site closed, and then spent some time at the monument, enjoying the fact that we were on Canadian soil, for Dan and I the first time in two months.

We drove from Vimy across the northern border and through the flat Belgian countryside right to Brussels - by the time we found the hotel and parked the car, it had been 14 hours since we'd left Caen.

The Butte de Lion: the only hill in Belgium, as far as I could
tell. It's man-made.

We spent the next day at the battlefield in Waterloo, climbed the Butte de Lion and visited the former headquarters of both Wellington and Napoleon, then had the best burgers I've had in months at a little restaurant in Waterloo. My parents left the next morning to return to Paris to end their trip.

So for those of you who know my Dad, I think it was pretty much a dream vacation for him. He was a reservist in the 1st Hussars for much of his life, and a peace keeper with the UN force in the Golan Heights. He is a military history re-enactor and a police officer. He is, at heart, very much a soldier, and so to visit these places is to pay homage to his brothers in arms.

For me, these sights would have been interesting in their own right. But with my Dad at the wheel as tour guide and interpreter, offering explanations and insights and taking us to these incredibly moving sites that we'd have otherwise missed - for me, this made the experience so much richer.

S.

Reconstructed trench at Vimy Ridge

Ah, Paris.

Dijon

Having descended from our alpine adventure, we set our sights north. After a botched attempt to find a hotel or hostel room in Lyon, we found ourselves at a campsite in the Beaujolais region of France - home to many a world-renowned vineyard. We took the time on our way out of the area the next morning to drive along the tiny back roads, taking in the rolling hills of vines laid out one after another after another, spreading into a wonderfully rhythmic vista of perfect green rows that are finished here and there with a bright rosebush.

We spent the afternoon wandering the small city of Dijon. The city centre is quite pretty, and we spent some time in the fine art museum which is housed in the gorgeous old ducal palace of Burgandy. And obviously we bought mustard, which is Dan's favourite food. At the end of the night, we had our most elaborate meal yet - escargot (in an adventurous moment) and fish for me, beef bourginon for Dan. At 60€, it was also thus far our most expensive meal.

The next day we meandered north through the back roads and eventually found Meaux, where we said goodbye to our beloved steed and without mentioning that we had definitely ruined the breaks, grabbed a train to Paris.

Along the way, we found the source
of the mighty River Seine: this tiny
stream, bubbling up through the grass.

Paris did not disappoint. Glamorous and gritty, authentic and overwhelmingly touristy, Paris is everything it promises to be. Both the hostels we stayed at were in Montmartre - the hill looming in the north, and in the late nineteenth century, the haunt of the city's artistic community. (Our first hostel was just a few doors down from a house once owned by Vincent Van Gogh's brother, where the artist stayed early in his career.)






In our four-and-a-half days in the city, we were able to see a number of major attractions. We climbed up to the Sacre Coeur, the basilica commanding a phenomenal view from the top of the Montmartre hill. We walked out to the Père Lachaise cemetery,where we visited the graves of Oscar Wilde, Proust and Jim Morrison, wandering among the tombs both broken and dilapidated and dutifully preserved, the tree-lined avenues creating gentle quiet despite the tourists flitting about on their various homages.

We walked through the gardens and the courtyard of the Louvre, admiring the intricate details of the grand architecture, but in as I'd been inside the museum on my last visit to Paris, and we are both very interested in impressionist and post-impressionist art, we opted to spend a day exploring the much more manageable Musée d'Orsay. We did the same with Notre Dame, the Arc de Triumph and the Eiffel Tower - admired each from the ground without paying to go in or up.

The morning of Friday the 20th of May, we met my parents at Gare du Nord and checked into our new hotel. After a brief time to settle in, we began our week-long historical voyage.

Throughout my childhood, many of our vacations involved either the family hobby of historical re-enacting, or visits to colonial forts and battlefields from every North American war or a combination. This would be no different. (Although at 24, I certainly enjoy and seek out these sites and museums more than I'd once thought I would. For me thirteen-year-old self, this would have been a painful trial)

In the hall of mirrors

We started by visiting the tomb of Napoleon at the Musée d'Armée, taking in as well the exhibits of medieval suits of armour. Our final day in Paris, leaving Dan behind nursing a cold, we ventured out to the palace of Versailles. The first part of the afternoon, I spent with my Mom and Dad wandering through the elaborate, never-ending splendor of the gardens. We wandered through the series of small gardens, sheltered by hedges and each centered on a sculpted fountain, through the breezy tree-lined boulevards, and by the giant expanse of the grand canal. I left them to enjoy the whimsical madness of Marie Antoinette's fake peasant village while I made my way back to the palace to find Dan. We explored the palace in the late afternoon - unbelievably elaborate, crowned by the hall of mirrors, dazzling in its excess with hundreds of gold-rimmed mirrors and gold-covered statues, throwing the light around the room to beautiful effect.

The next morning, we picked up a car at Gare du Nord. Although this time it was Dad driving, I was back in the navigator's seat with my trusty atlas of France in my lap - thankfully, though, sandwich making duties had now been delegated to the back seat. With minimal agony we found our way out of Paris and we were headed northwest to Normandy.

S.

The Road Trip: Riviera

Early May, we left Barcelona on a Eurolines bus to France. Originally we had planned to take the train down the Riviera and up to Lyon, where we would rent a car and tour the alps in (compact) style - but given our new time-crunch (expletive directed towards the Schengen Agreement...), we decided to rent the car right at the Spanish - French border and return it just east of Paris 13 days later.

We picked up our sweet steed in the town of Narbonne. While waiting for the car, we discovered a fourteenth century cathedral - although we'd seen churches that claimed to be older, it was really nice to explore the damp, musty interior. Churches are nicer when they aren't tourist traps.

Our car was a Fiat 500, standard transmission. Tiny engine but, as we proved later that week, entirely alp-worthy. The arrangement for our two week rental was that Dan would drive and I would navigate old school - ie with a giant atlas - because we are too cheap for GPS.

Enormous bridge at Meyruis, Parc des Cevannes.

From Narbonne, we drove north into the Pyrenees to the Cevannes National Park, a former tableland that has been gouged out by rivers into a series of long peaks and deep gorges that make for phenomenal hiking and exciting driving, if you're into whipping around one-and-a-half lane roads and cliffs and near death experiences. Cough, cough, Dan.

We stayed at a nearly empty campground and that night thanked our lucky stars that we had invested in a puffy, 7€ comforter for the duration of the road trip, because the temperature that night fell to nearly zero degrees Celsius. Wrapped up in layers and our fleece blankets and the comforter, after a bottle of red wine, we made it through the night warm and happy.

The next day we got hiking information at the tourist office in nearby Florac and hiked up one of the peaks. As our first climb in a couple weeks we were easily winded, but the view over the hills and gorges was worth the thigh pain.

From the Cevannes, we drove high up along a long peak and then descended into Avignon, which is pretty, but expensive, and then to Arles. As the city is famous primarily for being home to Vincent Van Gogh for over a year, we couldn't help but take a Van Gogh tour to see the original buildings and landscapes he spent the year painting. We also toured through the Roman colosseum, which is still used today for non-lethal bullfights.

The view of Arles from the colosseum

We drove along the French Riviera, encountering navigational difficulty only when we accidentally ended up in chaotic Marseilles, generally avoiding the cities and sticking to the small, winding roads along the coast. Even in May, the water is turquoise and inviting, the beaches are covered with sunbathers and screeching children and the cliffs in the background are stunningly picturesque. We stopped for the night just west of St Tropez, back in the woods away from the coast, and then on the Sunday night just west of Nice.

I'd been to Nice before, in 2008 with my best friend Piper, and we had a phenomenal time - coming back and looking for the gorgeous, lively town I expected to show Dan, I was a bit disappointed. If you're not in Nice to party, it seems to be a bit too full of tourists and dirty to be as enjoyable as I remember. Although I'm sure had we gone to the beach early in the day, I'd have spread my towel over the smooth, hot stones and been as content in the Mediterranean sun as I was three years ago. Nice will have to live in my hazy, happy memory.

The beach at Menton, just east of Nice
on the Franco-Italian border.

Dan and I both very much enjoyed being in Southern France. Primary among the reasons, past the usual stuff about the scenery and the food (I love cheese. I LOVE IT.) was the simple fact that we could once again communicate with people past basic needs. Neither of us are fluent in French, but we are both functional, and after just a few days of being surrounded by the language and the culture we were quickly picking our floundering vocabularies back up and chatting, if in a bit of a slow stutter. It is amazing the difference it makes to the travelling experience!

I will have the alpine section of the road trip up in a few days - we miss everyone at home!

S

Parc des Cevannes - sometimes, there's just no rushing the drive.