My friend Jaclyn and I decided to book a day trip to Normandy in Northern France to go on a tour of the beaches from the D-Day invasion.
We took a train there, and it was about a 2 hour ride so not too bad. Once we were there, we waited at the train station for our guide to show up. He arrived in a van and he picked us up along with 6 other tourists.
First he took us La Pointe du hoc, which had a bunch of German bunkers and artillery on the coast. It was were 225 American rangers fought to disable to the artillery guns. It was really important to control because the point was right between both Utah and Omaha beaches so it could fire on both of them. Most of the bunkers were completely destroyed so there wasn't much left but ruins. As expected of a place that was heavily shelled and bombed, there were countless craters, which are now covered in grass. There was one well preserved bunker though so we got to go inside.
After seeing La Pointe du hoc, we went to a part of Omaha Beach. There was a US National Guard memorial monument near the beach, but besides that there was no sign of the war. But it was still cool to go to the beach.
The next part of the tour was to go to the American Cemetary where thousands of American soldiers are buried. The cemetary is extremely well-kept and was really beautiful. After getting some information from the guide, we were allowed about 45 minutes of free time to explore the cemetary on our own.
We all met back at the van so we could go to our last stop. Our last stop was on a hill overlooking Omaha Beach so we got to see just how large the beach really is.
The tour lasted about 5 hours in total but it went by so fast. I wish the tour could have been in French but Jaclyn and I were the only ones who spoke French so that wouldn't have been fair to the others haha. It was really interesting though and I had a lot of fun.
The guide dropped us back off at the train station. Jaclyn and I had about 2 hours before our train was going to arrive so we killed time by eating at a local bar/restaurant until it was time to catch out train.
The day went by really quickly and it was around 11pm by the time I got back to my appartment in Paris. But it was definitely a really good trip.
Here are some pictures:
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