Normandy Beaches

I finally got to take my trip to Normandy. I've been waiting to go to Normandy this whole semester. So two other girls and I decided kind of last minute to buy a train ticket to Caen. So we woke up pretty early to catch the first train and didn't realize that we were going to have to take another train to get to Bayeaux to see Omaha Beach. So we sucked it up and went, because we all three really wanted to go. When we got in Bayeaux, we realized that the Saturday buses are next to worthless, so we decided to split the price for a seventy euro taxi. So after six hours, we finally arrived at the American museum and cemetery. We started off in the museum. The museum isn't that big, but it is pretty interesting. It has some tributes from soldiers and a few displays of what they carried or what the medics carried. They also have a sacrifice memorial. Inside this room, someone is constantly reading the names of soldiers who were killed on D-Day. It has a pretty chilling effect. It's very sobering.

From here, we walked over to the American cemetery, which overlooks Omaha Beach. It's a really moving place. There are lines and lines and lines of white crosses, and you can't even see the end of it. At first, it's just like any other cemetery, but at some point it strikes you that all these people died in just a few short days. After this realization, it's hard to know what to feel--proud, angry, sad...I don't know what. It's definitely a very somber place that makes you feel an unbelievable amount of respect for the men who charged the beaches that day.

When we got down to the beaches, it's even that much more impressive. There's no way anyone would have been able to RUN up the beaches. Most of them would have been walking under a wall of fire. And remembering my history, a good number of them had to put down their packs to be able to walk through the water. The amount of sheer courage it would have taken to walk up the beach, unarmed with no cover is inconceivable. It's a miracle anyone made it up the beach. It was a very strange experience to walk along the beach with the intention of observing that part of history while there were children playing around war memorials and having fun on the beach. That is the best indication the world can give us that life must go on as usual.



But I'm very glad that we went, even though it took ten hours of traveling to spend two hours seeing what we wanted to. It's something I will appreciate for the rest of my life.