Normandy/Normandie/Normandía - Day 3

If Day 2 was a transportation fail, Day 3 was a transportation win! We caught a bus to the Memorial in Caen first thing, which is a GIGANTIC museum. Of course, we only made it through one exhibit before it was time to move on, but it was the D-Day exhibit - the most important one, right? The striking thing about the exhibit (and the thing that reminded me of the different interpretations of the landings, even between groups on the same side) is that at the end, the conclusion was something like Normandy paid the price for the liberation of France, in terms of material damage and lives lost, etc. I wasn't sure what the point of this was: to complain about being first liberated? Would you have rather the Allies liberated somewhere else first and you had stayed longer under Nazi rule, perhaps subject to reprisals for enemy victories? Are you complaining that no other region experienced as much material and human damage? Blame that on the Nazis, who threw in their last reinforcements in Normandy and couldn't put up much of a fight in the rest of France. I mean, I'll be the first to admit that Allied bombing of Normandy was not very effective strategically for the number of bombs and the material destruction, but that assessment seemed...bitter? Anyway, I digress.

Photo from the Museum - This film is URGENT

We left the Memorial in order to catch a bus to Pegasus Bridge, which was one of the objectives of airborne troops the morning of D-Day. We learned so so so much from our personal tour: that Pegasus Bridge was the first bit of French territory liberated by the Allies on D-Day, that gliders and not parachutists were used, that the bridge over the canal and not the Orne is the more famous of the two objectives, and that Prince Charles was at the Pegasus Bridge on the anniversary in 2000 with current British paratroopers. The man who showed us around also introduced us to a British Veteran who happened to be there, who was perhaps 80 years old and had tears in his eyes. It was a privilege to speak with him about his experiences.

View of the bridge over the Canal (which we later learned was a fake!)

The REAL Pegasus Bridge, which the French Government replaced and then sold to the Memorial for 1 euro

Replica of the gliders used on D-Day

Wreckage of an actual glider (probs not one that crashed on D-Day)
By virtue of the fact that the gliders were launched before dawn and that securing this bridge took all of 10 minutes

Those two markers mark where the first glider landed. The bridge indicates where the bridge they were supposed to take was. Somebody deserves a medal for that landing.

The Veterans leave (fake) poppies every time they visit for an anniversary.

Finally, it was time for me to get back on a train to Paris, then on another train to Madrid. In the meantime, since I had two hours to kill in Paris, I stepped out of the metro to snap a photo of the Eiffel Tower (hell, I'm in Paris). Unfortunately, I have about seven that all look like this:

And that, my friends, was my trip to Normandy!