End of Week 3 –The American Military Museum and Le Mans

Today we visited the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial, which is the American cemetery for the soldiers who lost their lives in WWII, primarily in the D-Day invasions.  The Cemetery is located in Colleville-sur-Mer, at the top of a cliff overlooking Omaha Beach.  Similar to the Commonwealth Cemeteries, it is kept in pristine condition, with crosses to mark the bodies of the soldiers, and a long wall with the names of soldiers whose bodies were never found. 

As you arrive at the cemetery, you get the option of either visiting the cemetery, or going to the visitor centre.  We chose to visit the cemetery first, and see the memorial, the chapel and walk around amongst some of the graves.  We went to find the grave of Theodore Roosevelt, the Son of the President of the same name, who was the only General to land at the time of the initial landing, onto Utah Beach, and gave the command to get going with the war, even though tides had meant that they had landed two miles away from their expected landing spot.  He died a month later, of a heart attack at the age of 57.

We also saw two graves side by side that had a small American flag under each one.  I went to have a look, and saw that they were two brothers, Robert and Preston Niland, who were killed a day apart from one another – Robert on D-Day, Preston the day after.  We  later learned that this was the family that the fictional movie Saving Private Ryan was based on.  In real life, the third brother who was missing in the Pacific was later found in a Japanese POW camp.

After visiting the Cemetery, we went to the visitor centre, which was fascinating, and contained many of the statistics about the D-Day landings, and the logistics of how the whole operation was put together.  There was also a film interviewing Dwight Eisenhower, and there was a film about 3 particular soldiers who had been part of D-Day and their personal stories.

On Sunday, we transitioned to the Loire, and seeing an opportunity to do something new that was a possible means of getting there, we stopped for the night at Le Mans, home of the famous 24 hour race.  This was a change from our original plan, as we had planned to go to Brittany before the Loire, but once we got to Europe, and discovered all the things there were to do around the WWI sites, and the Normandy beaches, and indeed Normandy itself, we decided to drop Brittany and take more time in the other places.

The Le Mans race has been going since 1923, and we spent a couple of hours visiting the museum there, which is right beside the race track.  The Museum had an impressive display of vintage cars, as well as many of the wining cars from about the last 20 years.  We weren’t able to see the race track because there were some local bike races going on that day.  We spent the evening in a hotel in the centre of Le Mans, catching the start of the last stage of the Tour de France, and going to a local restaurant.  The last stage of the TdF left from Versailles, which is where we will be staying next Sunday night, so it was nice to get a reminder of how beautiful the Palace and the gardens at Versailles are.

The drive from Normandy all the way through to the Loire, was on the great French motorway system, which although you have to pay for some parts of it, is a great way to cover large distances in a very short space of time.  The charges tend to act as limiting factor on the amount of traffic that use it, and for the pace that you are able to maintain, and the fact that you can get directly from A to B without having to crawl through all those wonderful little French towns, it really is money well spent.  Compared to the quality of the roads we encountered in the Neterlands and Belgium and the roads we have experienced in Germany in the past, there really is something to be said to paying tolls to use a road.