Tuesday, July 8: St. Mere Eglise and Mont St. Michel

This morning, we walked across the roundabout to the Airborne Museum. The first building had lots of info on uniforms and paratrooper gear plus a glider that was used to carry additional troops and supplies.

 Many of the gliders crash landed among buildings, hedgerows and fields staked by the enemy to foil landings. This was not the first time we heard about the difficulties that the hedgerows caused the Allies. Not only are these hedgerows dense and tall, they are everywhere between fields and homes. They impeded the flow of men and supplies, but most importantly, they provided cover to the enemy, making it more like guerilla warefare, which was not something our forces were trained in at that time.

The first building was pretty standard museum stuff – cases with artifacts, etc. When we got to the second building, things changed dramatically. They had a plane replica with paratroopers sitting in it waiting to jump. As we walked through it in the dim lights, we could hear the pilots static radio, the constant noise of the plane engines and we could feel the vibration of the plane in the air. Then as we got to the back, we were suddenly confronted with an open door, a whoosh of air and the feeling you just jumped into the night sky over Normandy as we walked out onto a clear platform. Below us were the many parachutes of other jumpers, the fields of Normandy and the rooftops of the town. A truly incredible experience.

Next, we watched two excellent films about the invasion and learned about the invasion from the perspective of the airborne divisions. 

An excellent map from the museum that shows the D-Day invasion of ground and air forces

The church steeple where the paratrooper hung for hours playing "dead"  Tacky replication of paratrooper and his chute and I debated whether to take this photo, but the church is authentic 

 After leaving the museum, we walked across the square to see the church where the paratrooper was caught on the steeple and had to play dead for hours, hoping the Germans below would not shoot. One of the best D-Day invasion museums we have seen.

I believe these are flags from the homelands of the paratroopers - note the SC flat with palm tree and moon way on the left

We returned to the RV and stopped at a grocery store a few miles away.

View of the countryside

 We are leaving the northern coast of France.  This map will show a bit of where we have been, a photo of a map in one of our brochures.

We drove 1 ½ hours southwest across the peninsula to Mont St. Michel – a city built around an abbey on an island in the bay. We are staying right in the RV parking lot for its convenience to the Mont, although the RV lot is the last one in a very long series of parking lots. We are about ½ mile walk from the shuttle buses that take visitors across a causeway to the island.  

After a late nap, we walked to the information booth by the shuttle buses and found that the abbey closed at 7pm. We decided it was too late to start our visit and decided to wait until the morning to explore the abbey, surrounding buildings and the narrow cobblestone streets that make up the town that grey around the abbey.

After dark, around 11 pm, I walked a mile up the path towards the Mont to get some shots of the beautifully illuminated church and abbey, rising out of the dark sea. I didn't have a tripod, so the shots are not as good as I had hoped.