07. August 2022 · Comments Off on European Vacation Day 3: Caen Memorial Museum Part 2 & Longue-sur-Mer · Categories: Uncategorized
The boys asked to be awakened early so they could hit the market and bakery to pick up breakfast and dinner food. Unfortunately I overslept so they did too. They hit the market about 30 min later than planned.
19 July 22: More photos from our day at the Caen Memorial Museum and Longue-sur-Mer. The heat prevented doing anything more.
Fortunately a line of thundershowers came thru the area and cooled things down on the coastline a bit for the visit to the German gun emplacement at Longue-sur-Mer. And things will be much cooler tomorrow.
We are wiped out! Dave and the boys have more or less accused me of being like Clark Griswold in Paris during this portion of the trip…so I promise to not add anything else to the existing plans for Paris.
Tomorrow…we drive back to Paris, turn in the rental car, and prepare to do the rest of this trip with public transportation!!
Normandy butter.Took advantage of the small washer in the AirBnB. Highly recommend one of these travel clotheslines: Flexo-Line XL Campers Boaters Hikers Travelers Travel Compact Clothesline – https://amzn.to/3bFBHGzMore photos from the Caen Memorial Museum. If you pick one Museum to visit in the Normandy area, it needs to be this one. It offered a very comprehensive look at life in France before, during, and after the war. The exhibits are beautifully laid out, employing a wide variety of media to keep one’s attention.
Our family loved the chance to see the war through another nation’s perspective. I felt we were seeing things here that I’m not sure are seen in American museums. Here is a German war poster suggesting that the sick cost Germans money to “maintain”…so why not exterminate them to save money.A photo of someone measuring the facial features of a Gypsy. “Anthropometrics”. They were persecuted by the thousands, but not with the same urgency that Germany regarded the Jews.Why have I never heard of these American “Newsmaps” before? There were two full sized ones on display in the museum. This one focuses on Pacific operations…
In the lower right there’s an explanation of how geography isn’t on the Americans’ side in the Pacific theater…that a bullet used to “kill a Jap” took 3 months to get there.This hit me hard. I knew that the American bomber forces had a need to prepare the battlefield in advance of D-Day (and in the weeks following). To the residents of Caen, the perception is that the Allies did a terrible job and destroyed 35% of the city. The telling of this was very raw.A fabulous Cold War exhibit. The captions were written in 3 languages. Lots of “advanced” international relations type dialogue going on here.We had been watching the conditions in Paris pretty closely. A risk we took in electing to stay in AirBnBs was foregoing air conditioning. Tomorrow is showing a high of 79F in Paris but it will quickly warm back into the 90s while we’re there. The Caen Memorial is built atop a German infantry division commander’s bunker built into a bluff. The bunker space is an exhibit of life in the bunker, featuring many of the artifacts left behind when the Germans fled Caen.Filling the tank of our Opel SUV. But it is getting about 30 mpg…You’d think we were in Lancaster County with all the cornfields…The 150mm gun emplacements at Longue-sur-Mer are the most intact on the Normandy coast.Dave is in there, if you look closely.Our first taste of Calvados region cider. First of all, the bottle exploded hard when we opened it, spraying the kitchen with about 1/2 of the contents. With the little bit left, we all agreed it tasted like “barn” with notes of manure.
I wonder if it had gone bad. It should not have acted that way after having sat on the countertop all day.
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