TriumphAnt

A bit of a heads-up. My handwritten notes are replete with little paragraphs and sentence fragments that are headed “AITOI”. “As I Think Of It” is simply a reminder to myself that the note reflects a point of recall that I jotted down out of sequence. So when it occurs here, it’ll mean the same thing – a fun fact or vital observation too important to exclude (insert smiley here), but out of chronological order.

For example: AITOI: Air France doesn’t charge you a thing (well, not in addition to the ticket price, anyway) for the many extras they provide. You’re barely in the air before they pass out a package that includes a headset, snazzy sleep blindfold, freshener towelette and earplugs. Most important of all, all the beverages you can consume – whether alcoholic or not – are provided at no extra cost. It really makes Canada’s airline “service”, whose only freebie is a small foil bag of a half dozen granite pretzels, look like the product of pikers. And as you taxi into CDG, you will find it hard to miss an absolutely magnificent pedestal-mounted Air France Concorde – a sleek reminder of the glory days when aviation fuel was cheap and the local decibel police had not yet gotten around to imposing rules about the thundering howl that jet engines require to haul a supersonic airliner off the runway.

Back to Normandy.

How rural was it?
Well here’s what sunrise looked like straight out our doorway.

DAY 2

In a lot of French communities, catching Market Day is a treat. Well not in Carentan, the nearest large town to our Utah Beach gite. Maybe it’s different in high tourist season but, in October, aside from a few sporadic classic French market stall vendors offering cheese, bread or meat, it was a sea of cheap jeans, t-shirts and cheesy (in its other-than-Camembert meaning) miscellany that differed from the front lawns at an Ottawa event like the Great Glebe Garage Sale only in that the prices were displayed exclusively in Euros.

That being said, Carentan did offer us our first French community walkabout and it was a delight. Home to a wonderful old church,
(“Wonderful old church”, by the way, is simply a given in any French community with a population of 100 or more. Even the tiniest community is inevitably centred on a stunning stone structure whose foundation like as not was laid down the same decade William the Conqueror pushed across the channel for his fateful meeting with Harold at Hastings in the year 1066.) Carentan also has warmly cobbled sidewalks, small close streets
and an institution over whose name we are still puzzling, the “Gymnasium de Haut Dick”, whose punning prospects are so obvious that even I will let them pass.

It might also seem hard to believe, but cobbled or interlocking paving stones seem to make a much gentler walk than the same distance on concrete or perfectly flat asphalt. I suspect it’s because more of your foot from the ankle down is being exercised than is the case on North American sidewalks. Maybe some local chiropody college could be found to fund the necessary research and I volunteer to submit to a strapped-on ankle monitor if they spring for a week of my strolling about Oxford or Cambridge or, for that matter, just about any town in Europe. But I digress.


Day 1 in Carentan was also the day we discovered that our PIN-less credit cards were going to be problematic. But if I was going to have to wash dishes to earn our escape from the restaurant in which we first tried to use one, a Pommeau aperitif (a local treat that blends harsher Calvados with a soothing quantity of cider), grilled hake, a fantastic red “vin maison” and a local cheese board by way of dessert was a price worth paying. (Fortunately, we had more than enough cash to cover the meal.)

And another general travel note. France automatically includes what we would consider to be a “tip” in the total that makes up their bill in a service-related business like a hotel, bar or restaurant. Attempting to add a further 15% (and I speak from experience here, until fortunately rescued by Leslie and, once again, her pre-trip homework) will earn you a look on the order of “Are you out of your mind??” Especially when you’ve pretty much been treated as an imbecile because three credit cards in a row failed to clear and the door to the kitchen and its sinkful of dirty dishes was beginning to open. (“Wait, monsieur, let me insult you some more and you can make it 30 per cent!”)

AITOI: Before I left, I received an e-mail from a regular Duck reader (thanks, Champ!) advising me to order the house wine. The logic is wonderfully simple. France is a wine country. Any restaurant offering a shoddy house wine is not going to be in the restaurant business for very long. So that’s exactly what we did, and along the way discovered many wonderful wines – a peppery red with echoes of Valpolicella in one place, and a fresh fruity Gewurtztraminer that was absolutely perfect with the veal cordon bleu we had ordered at a little place in Alsace. Oh, they’ll happily dredge their cellar to pander to a wine snob who wants to impress a table mate by ordering an hilariously overpriced label… but the same money will get you a minimum of three times the amount of house wine. (Or, conversely, the same amount of house wine will cost you a third or less of their least expensive labeled product. I didn’t mean to imply we were lushes here.)

Back to the war.

The nearest community (Carentan being the nearest _big_ community) to our gite was a small town called Ste-Marie-des-Monts and it bills itself as the first French community liberated on D-Day. It is also home to two little museums that face each other across the small square at the centre of town – a Musée de l’Occupation and a Musée de la Liberation. We never did get into the former, despite dropping by twice at times advertised as “Ouvert” on a sign on the door. But we did get into the Musée de la Liberation with its small but amazing collection of artifacts that I have no doubt Canada’s War Museum would love to get its hands on.
In fact, even the public dining room of our gite was framed with wall cabinets that were jammed with similar artifacts that our host had simply found on his own by scouring the surrounding fields with a metal detector. It’s hard to imagine that living on a battlefield could ever be perceived as having a benefit, but the ready availability of so much historical paraphernalia pretty much turns almost everyone into an amateur archivist or a serious collector.


(This communion dress, as noted on the label above it, was made from the silk of a parachute.)

From the Musée, we made the first of what I had pre-determined was one of the few “must-see”s on my visit to this part of France. I beg a pardon for this allusion from anyone who has not yet seen “The Longest Day”, but one of its more memorable sequences involves an American parachutist, played by Red Buttons, getting his parachute hung up on the bell tower of the church at the centre of a town named Ste-Mère-Église. That scene was based on what really did happen to a Private John Steele, including the fact of his actually having had the heel of his boot shot off while he dangled from the tower during the fighting that accompanied the airborne troops’ landing all over the town.

And in a bit of admitted tourist appeal, the good people of Ste-Mère-Église have actually slung an effigy of Private Steele from a real parachute on the bell tower in exactly the position he was suspended late on the night of June 5. And here I am, with the haplessly bronzed Pte Steele hanging from the tower above me.



The admitted “fromagerie” of this particular exhibit aside, the town is also home to an outstanding museum – just across the square from the church – dedicated specifically to the airborne forces and their operations associated with the D-Day landings. Two separate buildings are built around, in the first case, a WACO glider and, in the second, a C-47 troop transport.

And each is simply packed with fascinating display cases that feature the array of materiel that accompanies an airborne operation. But more than this, there are also special exhibits devoted to the French resistance and their pre-invasion communications (and sabotage of German communications) that leant such immeasurable support to the Allied landings). The real Private Steele himself made a couple post-war trips back to the town, duly photographed and recalled in a display in the museum, and the town is understandably the focal point of regularly held postwar reunions of members of the airborne forces.

Then, pronouncing ourselves “museumed out” for the day, we retired to our gite and in this most perfectly appropriate of settings, watched “The Longest Day” on a DVD player that was in our room. It was goose bump-inducing to be viewing the onscreen caption “Utah Beach”, while sitting mere yards from the actual location of those events’ recreation by Mr Zanuck and company. And of course, to watch again the dramatized plight of Pte Steele above the Ste-Mère-Église town square.
(Photo: Flickr.com)

Up next: A day’s hiatus from the war – Mont St Michel.