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Traveling across the Pond, part 2
(Editor’s note: Marilyn Helms, a business professor at Dalton State College, and her husband recently took a trip to the United Kingdom and Normandy, France. Below is part two of Helms’ thoughts on her travels.)
London — Sunday
We had breakfast in the basement of the Holiday Inn. It was toast, yogurt, cereal, coffee and tea. Our friend Judith met us after breakfast. Judith, a former librarian at DSC, is now living in London, taking care of her elderly uncle and traveling from London to Hungary to visit her mother at her assisted living facility. She welcomed the chance for a short break and trip. We traced the route for our trip to France. Since we had an early morning train we wanted to scout out the connection from the subway to our Euro Star International train terminal at the large Saint Pancras Station.
Judith had bought us “Oyster Cards” for the subway. These electronic cards don’t have to be passed inside the machine and retrieved but simply left in their case or your wallet and passed over a palm-sized yellow circle on top of the subway entrance and exit turnstiles for a much faster entry and exit. We used our cards to travel to Oxford Circus to grab a quick pastry from one of the many Cornish-style takeaway shops. The pastries are filled with varieties of vegetables, meats, or cheeses. We grabbed a bus to Hampstead Heath as it had started raining.
At Hampstead the rain had stopped and we walked through the up-scale neighborhood in the midst of their winter festival, market and parade with Father Christmas (Santa to us). We got several versions of directions from people on the street to the Heath itself, which is a bog or swamp/park area.
The Heath is a large, ancient parkland covering almost 800 acres and is one of the highest points in London. We walked past old, stately houses with expensive rent, we are told. At the Heath, many of the locals had on the proper tall rubber boots or Wellingtons for walking in the mud and leaves along the path. The prior night’s heavy rain made the area very muddy. Families were feeding ducks and swans at the lake located inside the Heath’s grounds. Residents were enjoying the paths as their dogs chased the ducks. We walked back toward the town of Hampstead and took a side street to Keats’ Grove to photograph John Keats’ (poet) home. He spent much of his day writing his poetry in the Heath.
We stopped at Starbucks to warm up with a hot drink. Judith had a complicated three-hour commute back to her uncle’s home as several of the key tube lines in her direction were closed for weekend repairs and her trip home included several busses and tub connections along the way. Also as it was nearing mid-afternoon, she wanted to start back before the sun set. We joined her on the tube but parted ways after several stops. We exited at Leister Square where we looked around and walked to Piccadilly Circus for photos and a stop in the ubiquitous Boot’s pharmacy to buy some great Cadbury “flake” candy bars and several popular British magazines. We walked back to Leister Square and on to Chinatown for some hot soup and hot tea. Our first waiter would not make any substitutions in the various soup dishes but the second waiter nodded and quickly returned with our shrimp and veggie noodle soup. It was a hot and good meal for 11£. We walked through Chinatown and bought some bottled (cold) tea from a busy Chinese two-story grocery that had a clear section in the floor where you could see shoppers in the basement below.
We joined a long line in front of a major movie theatre around 6 p.m. We decided to join the group to see the opening of “The New Moon” series. Tickets were 11£ each and our credit card was again rejected so we paid in cash. After the movie ended around 8 p.m. we walked back to the hotel.
Normandy, France —- Monday
At 5 a.m. we headed for the train station to board the Eurostar for Calais, France. The train left promptly at 7:30 a.m. and we were scanned, screened and showed our passports, just like at the airport. In the St. Pancras station many of the shops and stores were not open at 6:30 a.m. even though the station was full of people heading to trains and subways. We had coffee, two packets of grapes and breakfast muffins in an open coffee shop. We had printed our boarding information at home and Judith had a better two-sided copy for us. She met us at the train station and we passed the printout of the bar code at the turnstiles to the train and we were screened and ushered into the inner terminal. Trains board 20 minutes prior to departure. We had help finding our car and assigned seat. We stowed our luggage and the train sped across the south of London for a quick 21 mile trip under the English Channel and into Calais, France. It is one hour ahead on the European continent. At Calais, a Hertz employee met us and brought our rental car to the small station. We got into our Ford Escort wagon and sped away following the French maps Hertz provided.
The signs to Bruges, Belgium reminded us we took the wrong road in the roundabout. We stopped in Rouen, in route to Caen, to search for lunch and found few restaurants in the city and even less parking in the city center. We stopped at a roadside rest area and had ham and cheese sandwiches on baguettes from a French cashier who would prefer we weren’t there. The trip to Caen was about four hours with several toll booths along the way. Luckily, Judith had Euro coins and helped us navigate the day’s new currency. We checked into our tiny room in the Hotel Ibis and set off to the tourist information center which was closed on Monday as was one of the D-Day museums we were interested in.
Instead we walked in the wind and rain to the Chateau de Caen, one of Europe’s many fortified castles build in 1060 by William the Conqueror. Inside the castle grounds we visited three museums with various exhibits. One interesting museum was photos of life in Greenland and its current history after the country’s liberation (or designation of home-rule status) from Denmark in 1979. The photos were large and clear and showed life in the fishing areas of the country. Another on-site museum showed relics from the castle including tools, skeletons and other artifacts dating to the middle ages. The Museum of Normandy had clear models of the reconstruction of Caen during 1944 and 1963 and the dioramas depicted the devastation and bombing during World War II and the reconstruction process after the war. Caen was noted as a symbol of resistance by the civilian population. We walked down the city shopping streets with many residents out window shopping. We admired a local man’s nice dog as they were both sitting at a sidewalk café. As he drank his beer, the man spoke English and thanked us as Americans for helping at Normandy. We took a photo and petted his cute dog.
Earlier, we asked several helpful employees in the museum gift-shop about choices for dinner. They directed us to a row of restaurants not far from the castle and recommended two Italian and one French choice. We parked and walked among the restaurants. At the first Italian restaurant the employees were enjoying their dinner. It was 6:30 p.m. We were told we could come in and wait until after 7 p.m. when they opened. We walked a bit more in the rain and settled on another Italian restaurant that allowed us inside. We waited until their cook and two servers finished their dinner. We had pizza, calzones and green salads that were great. The waiter brought a hand-held credit card machine that connected electronically for payment processing. We returned to the hotel and found the underground car park. We changed all our phone chargers, camera chargers and other electronics to French 2-pronged plugs (from the prior three-prong UK plugs) and turned in for an early day tomorrow of museums and battlefields.
Normandy, France — Tuesday
The Ibis Hotel had a great buffet breakfast of yogurt, muesli, tea, bread, and jam and apple compote. The region is famous from their apples and feature many local apple dishes. Judith rushed about as she had not set her watch on the new continental Europe time. We checked out and headed to the Caen Memorial Centre Museum which reviewed various wars in general but focuses on D-Day, in particular. We spend some two and a half hours exploring the museum and its many exhibits and saw two films on the D-Day invasion. We purchased tuna sandwiches on baguettes from the museum snack bar and ate them in the car on the drive to the various D-Day beaches or “Jour-J” as the French call it. We passed numerous beautiful small farms and lots of apples, sweet potatoes and beet crops piled at the side of the road after their harvest. Finding the D-Day beaches was somewhat challenging. We had tourist literature with the names of the British, Canadian and American beaches. We had other area maps with the names of the various French cities along the D-Day coast, but lacked a map with both names on them to match up locations. From east to west the D-Day beaches are the first three sites of English and Canadian forces landings at Sword, Juno and Gold Beach followed by the two American landings at Omaha and Utah Beach from east to west, respectively.
We headed west starting at Gold Beach in Arromanches-les-Baines, the site of the floating docks and artificial port Winston (after Winston Churchill) where British intelligence, ingenuity and Royal Engineers is credited for manufacturing the artificial harbor which was important to logistics for operation Overlord. The British made the floating barges in the United Kingdom and towed them by boat to the invasion site some 21 miles away.
At Arromanches we chuckled at the restaurant, “Speed Food.” We continued west to the American beach point of dismemberment – Omaha Beach at Vierville-Sur-Mer to see landing crafts and other outdoor machinery. Omaha is known for its extremely bloody sacrifice for freedom. We stopped at the American Cemetery in Coleville Saint-Laurent-Sur Mer where President Obama had visited in June 2009 for the 65th D-Day anniversary of July 6, 1944. The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial is one of 14 permanent American World War II military cemeteries on foreign soil. In the cemetery, statues representing France and the US anchor one end of the long walkway. There is a chapel, Memorial Garden of the Missing, Visitor’s Center,and an overlook of Omaha Beach and the English Channel. The graves are laid out in 10 plots from A to J on the 172-acre site. There are 41 sets of brothers.
In the short film at the Cemetery Visitor’s Center we learned the location was dedicated on July 18, 1956. Some 60 percent of the soldiers killed here were returned to the U.S. for burial. The stark white cross in such precise rows and the sheer number of them (9,387 graves) was very moving and extremely powerful when thinking about the loss of lives. We had a grid showing the location of the graves of the Niland brothers, Robert and Preston. Their deaths and story were featured in the movie “Saving Private Ryan.” We continued to Pointe-du-Hoc the site of the entry of the various Army Rangers who scaled the cliffs at the water’s edge using ropes and folding ladders. These 300 brave rangers used hooks and ladders borrowed from London’s fire departments for their vertical assault. This Second Ranger Battalion scaled the cliffs to disable German guns threatening Utah and Omaha Beach. The rangers too suffered a 60 percent casualty rate.
Here we saw the shell craters from the aerial and naval bombardment, train track and railroad turntables for handling ammunition, observation posts, German bunkers and fortifications, and their many concrete trenches. This was the most heavily fortified position along the Normandy coast. We visited the Ranger Park and Memorial for some time and toured the bunkers and made photos from inside the deep round holes in the ground where the bomb damage is still apparent.
It was after 5 p.m. when we left and we then drove two hours west to Le Monte-Saint-Michele’s labyrinth medieval city and stone Benedictine abbey which seems to rise out of the sea. We had read about the abbey in the New York Times and decided it was a must see location. The gated city has two car parks at the base of the mountain structure. We parked our car and dragged our luggage over the steep cobblestone streets to our hotel, Les Terrases Poulard (www.terrases-poulard.fr) and its 29 rooms. Signed photos of their many guests dating back 100s of years lined the halls to our rooms. The village has only one street and our hotel was one of eight on the small island. The first sign we saw inside the walled city mentioned high tide was at 8:30 p.m. and it would be safe to leave our car in the lower car park. We didn’t realize this was an issue to even consider. Several cars and tour busses were parked beside our car so we watched the tide recede over the two-mile causeway entrance to the town and we walked inside the city. We found our hotel and climbed five sets of stairs up to our rooms and the hotel desk clerk suggested dinner reservations would be needed.
Along the walk to dinner at a restaurant inside the fortress city, we saw ramparts and numerous gargoyles. We passed two defibrillators along the way and were surprised by two cats shopping for their dinner inside a trash can. At the restaurant, the dinner menu was in English and French and we enjoyed vegetable soup and bread, seafood and an apple tart for dessert. We walked a bit more after dinner and joined a large group of Japanese tourists in the street to take photos of the abbey.
(Check back for part three of Helms' travelogue)
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