TriumphAnt

France 2008 – 1 / Introduction – and just getting there

After two weeks on the road that took us along 2,341 km of France’s roads and a third week of unknown kilometrage walked in Paris, I am sitting here with 75 handwritten diary pages, a digital photo file of 1100 images and I am thinking, oh what the hell, you people have nothing to do for the next year or so, right?

Just kidding – sort of.

I do have much to recommend and a few things (very few, come to think of it) to suggest that you avoid – “Memo to self: Do not ever drive in Paris again!!!” pretty much heads my brief “Avoid” list in large capital letters, underlined, boldfaced, circled in red, and tattooed on my forehead in reverse script so that I can read it every time I look in a mirror.

Let’s make a deal here. This blog is as much a personal record as it is something I enjoy sharing. But I don’t want to inflict the upcoming massive travel diary on anyone for whom the idea of a “What I did on my vacation” series holds all the appeal of a hangnail.

So here’s the deal: I will keep France in the subject head of however many update notices it takes until the last echoes of the pathetically crying dog in the baggage compartment of our thankfully brief end-of-trip-Montreal-to-Ottawa commuter flight have faded away. So when you see that “France” is gone from the e-mailed update announcements, you can safely return for the usual whiny diatribes you’ve come to love and admire. Until that time, “France” in the message title will largely mean France travel stuff in that Baby Duck.

In the meantime, feel free to abandon Baby Duck entirely for probably the next couple months if a lengthy recounting of our admittedly touristy trip is not something you want to share. (By “touristy”, I mean you will not discover off-the-beaten-track nooks and crannies – well, maybe a couple – because we pretty much stayed on the beaten track. In fact, we pretty much went to the places everyone else goes, for the simple reason that we’ve never been there before.)

But if you do want to share the coming revisit of a trip that Leslie and I very much enjoyed, here’s the route we’ll be taking – with many accompanying photos: Normandy and the D-Day landing beaches of Utah, Omaha and Juno, as well as environs such as Pointe du Hoc and Ste-Mère-Église, with side non-D-Day-related trips to Mont St-Michel and Bayeux; Arras and a few key bits of land – both above and below ground – that were bitterly contested during World War I, most memorably the Canadian experience at Vimy Ridge; Lunéville and a dinner at the Chateau Relais property, l’Adomenil, that will probably merit an entry all on its own; a delightful day’s drive along just a portion of the Alsace wine route; and a week in Paris.

But let’s start with a couple of really useful travel tips for the new millennium:

If you’re planning any international travel in the near future, make damned sure you have a credit card with a PIN (Personal Identification Number). That’s right, a credit card (NOT a debit card) with a PIN. Apparently it’s a system that has been introduced but at this writing is still on its way into general use in Canada. It’s already in general use – big time – in France. Even though before we left we had told our card-issuers – four separate banks – where we would be travelling, not once did even one of them say, “Register a PIN for your credit card”.

What saved us from having to use cash the whole trip after we arrived was the discovery – via a trans-Atlantic phone call made from a very helpful tourist bureau in Carentan – that I did in fact already have a PIN on one of my cards. It turns out that my Royal Bank Client Card PIN was the default PIN embedded in the chip on my Royal Bank VISA Gold credit card.

So to repeat: Planning to use a credit card when you travel? Before you go, make sure you have a registered PIN to go along with it. Because no one will register a PIN for you over the phone.

(The preceding was a Public Service Announcement brought to you by Citizens for Avoiding Coronary Arrest the First Time You Present Your Canadian Payment System in a Foreign Country. CACAFTYPYCPSFC – making foreign travel money transactions negotiable since November 2008.)

And here’s another one. If your travel plans begin with a drive over any distance, arm yourself from the outset with a reasonable amount of the local currency before you leave the airport (or at the start of wherever it is you hit the road). At least in France. Because toll roads are the norm along the major routes. Toll stations are not foreign exchange centres and you will encounter a palm out every half hour or so. (We had prepared for this, incidentally, but not through any foresight of mine. Because of Leslie’s pre-trip planning.

(The preceding has also been a Public Service Announcement from CACAFTYPYCPSFC.)

So to quote Jackie Gleason (Google him, youngsters): And aWAAAAAAY we go!

= = =

There are actually only a handful of movies whose titles come easily to mind when you ask someone, “Know any movies about D-Day?” “Saving Private Ryan” opens with a brutally realistic portrayal of the viciously contested American landing on Omaha Beach. The made-for-TV miniseries “Band of Brothers” has an outstanding episode that focuses on the pre-dawn D-Day experience of the airborne forces. And then of course there is the movie based on Cornelius Ryan’s book of the same name, “The Longest Day”. Although largely US-focused, the epic “The Longest Day” does include more than a passing reference to the role of the British, Canadian and Free French forces as well. Highly recommended (and you’ll hear a little more about it farther along).
(Poster: www.movieposter.com)

“Many men came here as soldiers;
Many men will pass this way.
Many men will count the hours
As they live the longest day.
Many men are tired and weary;
Many men are here to stay.
Many men won't see the sunset
When it ends the longest day.
The longest day. The longest day.
This will be the longest day;
Filled with hopes and filled with fears,
Filled with blood and sweat and tears.
Many men – the mighty thousands;
Many men to victory;
Marching on right into battle
In the longest day in history.”

(by Paul Anka, believe it or not)

But as it turned out, “The Longest Day” is also a hell of a good title to encapsulate the day we departed Ottawa, flew to Montreal for a connecting Air France flight to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, rented a car, drove some four hours north to a “gite” (a housekeeping apartment, pronounced “jeet”), a scant ten-minute inland walk from D-Day’s Utah Beach, and finally toppled into bed about 29 sleepless hours later.

A couple bits of interest from the trip itself. Air France is quite a pleasant service to fly. They treat you like an adult and actually serve their in-flight meals with metal cutlery.

Charles de Gaulle Airport seemed to us at first to have a somewhat cavalier attitude about security. Our passports were given a glance that wouldn’t even qualify as cursory. Then we saw the patrol of three automatic-rifle-armed French soldiers strolling casually through that airport. OK, Edit: Attitude about security: NOT cavalier.

Once we paid for our rental car*, before we actually went out to the lot to claim it, we thought we’d ask for basic directions out of the airport to the northbound expressway that was our immediate objective. Getting information, however, from the young lady at “Information” was to enter the land of “not”. Charles de Gaulle airport, or “CDG” as signs everywhere label it, is bigger than some cities, with four massive terminals. Your choices are many, many more than simply “Arrivals” and “Departures”. Our “Information” lady, however, didn’t know. In fact, she said she’d never been asked that question before.

(Wasn’t that Tom Hanks movie about the immigrant who couldn’t get out of the airport and wound up making it his home set in CDG? I now know why.... Nope, just Googled it. “The Terminal” was set in New York’s JFK. But it COULD have been CDG! But I digress.)

* I confess I had trouble trying to decide whether to call the vehicle we received a car, a mini-van or even a small truck. It was a Peugeot Partner 1.6D. Despite its truck-like appearance, it was a compact but powerful vehicle at ease on highway and town streets alike. (There’ll be a couple photos of it farther on. Including one that will show it sitting right next to a museum-quality Kubelwagen.)

Fortunately, I had an excellent navigator and Leslie was armed to the teeth with printouts of online Michelin trip guides that quite literally began, as it turned out, at the rental car lot at CDG and ended a four-hour drive later at the exit that turned us towards Utah Beach. The Michelin online trip planner is so good they even include the text you can expect to find on major exit or route change signs.

Emphasis on “major”. Along the way, we got lost only once, along a ring road – what the French with perfect logic call a “Periphérique” – via which we had intended to bypass Caen. From Day 1 of our driving, we discovered that French highway signs really don’t adhere to any sort of consistent rhyme or reason. Often, we would approach a roundabout knowing the name of the town we next wanted to reach, or the number of the highway we needed to follow to get there, only to find that the direction was actually labelled not with that town or city name, but with one or even several centres farther along the road, and no highway number. Once we figured that out, as we approached each new roundabout Leslie adopted a policy of reading out the next several towns along the highway we needed to follow and inevitably at least one would appear on the list of names posted beside the correct exit.

While we’re on the subject of highway directions, do not assume that years, decades even, of North American driving experience will enable you to figure out everything presented symbolically to you along foreign highways. For example, very early on we saw that we were often passing a sign that was simply a yellow diamond on a white background. Know it? We didn’t. Then once in a while, we would pass a sign that was the same symbol but with a black diagonal line through it. It happened often enough that I finally asked Leslie if there was any indication of its meaning in her voluminous road-related literature. And fortunately, there was.
The yellow diamond means that you are on a road to which everyone else has to yield the right of way. But a diagonal stroke through it means that you are on something like an access ramp where your right of way has been suspended and you must yield the right of way to any merging traffic. It’s perfectly sensible, but the symbol bears no resemblance at all to the message and to someone used to a point-down triangle as the symbol for “Yield”, it made no sense at all until Leslie found it in the guide.

Finally, with no mishap at all and only the Caen misdirection as our one brief episode of “getting lost”, we reached one of the most ironically peaceful strips of countryside I have ever been on in my life – a blissfully calm rural landscape a half mile inland from the westernmost of the D-Day landing beaches. Utah.

Our gite was pastorally named The Ivy House. After checking in, still running on nothing more than adrenaline we couldn’t bring ourselves to sleep right away. So we decided to take a walk from our gite to the beach itself.

For some reason we never did discover, we found that a farm right next door to our Utah Beach gite was home to this pair of wallabies...

...while a few dozen yards closer to the shore, we happened upon this energetic exercise in herding llamas into a nearby pasture. And to further add to the surreality, our hostess had given us a very simple set of directions to get to the beach, including "Turn at the Shetland", which we took to mean perhaps a pub or restaurant by that name. But no, standing right smack at the little intersection that turned us directly towards Utah beach was... a Shetland.




Normandy was already shaping up to be... different.

I really can’t put into words what was running through my mind – even on this very first day, at this time and in a mental state that was pretty much near exhaustion. But it was very much a sense of place. We were casually strolling along a road that had been used to funnel German defenders forward, and then in very short order in headlong retreat away from Utah Beach. The thinly spread German troops, already badly dazed on this stretch of the D-Day beaches by the pre-invasion air force bombing and heavy naval gun bombardment, found themselves simply overwhelmed by the thousands of American troops pouring ashore.

The Allies planned the D-Day landings to occur at low tide, so as to expose the thousands of boat-ripping, mine-topped booby traps the Germans had planted in the sand. Unfortunately, that decision meant the landing troops had to charge up several hundred yards of exposed beach. Utah, seen here, would be a relatively easy go of it for the US soldiers, but their colleagues at Omaha, and the Canadians and Brits at Juno, Gold and Sword found themselves in the open and under intense defensive fire from the moment the doors of their landing craft opened. It's hard to imagine that hell when one is confronted with such a placid scene like this.


Of the five beach-bound D-Day forces (the other beaches were code-named Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword), Utah’s US invaders were the lucky ones. They actually landed about a mile and a half away from where they were supposed to have landed and were thus out of reach of the German artillery that would have brought them under fire had they gone ashore where they were supposed to. Compared to the firestorm that faced almost everyone else in the landing force that June 6 morning, the Utah attackers poured some 20,000 men ashore with a comparatively light casualty count of less than 200 dead.

Our gite, as noted, was named the Ivy House and for a reason that had a delightful resonance for someone like myself, who is a fan of cryptic crossword puzzles. The first Division ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day was the US Fourth Infantry Division. (Photo from shop-las-vegas.com)
Their division crest is a tan diamond shape with a green ivy leaf at each corner. Which only leaves the question of why the Fourth Infantry Division would select ivy leaves to represent them. Well, I cheat a bit when I render their name as “Fourth”. It is more often rendered as IV Infantry Division, and the Roman numeral “IV” is, of course, “Ivy” when spoken.

Our host, Sarah, welcomed us warmly, a greeting reinforced by a generously stocked larder (“just to get you started”) that included a dozen small fruit yogurts, 2L of bottled water, orange juice, coffee, tea, two cereal jars, one filled with granola / muesli, the second with corn flakes, as well as butter, jam and a bag with ten croissants. The Ivy House was actually a house and stable at one time, and Sarah and her husband, Steve, have spent several years bringing it around to a lovely place to stay. Our gite was at its far end, and because of the lateness of the season, we found we had lucked into a two-storey, two bedroom space with a kitchen, sitting room and full bathroom.

Up next: After a 16-hour nap that pretty much wiped out both fatigue and jet lag in one fell swoop, a fuller exploration of the places that became history on June 6, 1944 and the places where many of its victims still lie.