I was fortunate to be able to reschedule a trip to France in the winter of 2010. I was accompanied on this return trip by a peer from another office who would help me with my work.
I took some cold medication during the flight as I was trying to shake off the effects or a cough I had most of the month. The medication helped me sleep during the flight, but left me a bit groggy the last hour or two of the flight. Cold water in the face and good coffee down the hatch helped quite a bit.
This was not my first to Paris
by a long shot, but it was my first trip to the older terminal, T-1, at the Charles de Gaulle airport near Paris. The airport terminal is donut shaped built around a ground to roof atrium. Secure access from one floor to the next is by people movers enclosed within plexiglass tubes. The airplanes do not come right up to the terminal but the gates are located in satellites connected to the terminal by underground people-movers. The entire set-up leaves one with the impression of being a human hamster inside a giant hamster cage.It was raining when we left the airport (same song, different verse?), but we made good time and arived in Le Havre just a little over two hours, including a stop for coffee and a snack.
My co-worker had never been to France before and his father had served in WW2 in Europe, so we headed out to Normandy the next day. I had been to the Normandy battlefields twice before, so I gave him my own best of Normandy tour (or as they say in translated French, “Beaches of Disembarkation.” We visited the Pegasus Bridge, location where British gliders landed and captured the bridge of D-Day, drove along the British landing sites, and stopped at Arromanches, location of the man-made harbor used during the first months of the invasion, and a German battery silenced during D-Day (and featured in the initial scenes of “The Longest Day” movie where the Germans watched the incoming Allied ships). We also stopped at the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach. The cemetery has a visitor center built for the 60th anniversary of D-Day. The museum includes a moving film about some of the soldiers buried in the Cemetery (or in one case, memorialized on the “Wall of the Missing”) where surviving family and friends talk about the soldier’s life as they were growing up, just before they left for Europe, or their last letters home. Each story ended with a view of their grave site.
The sun came out as we walked among the Crosses and Stars of David. We walked down a trail to the beach itself, where some of the largest number of casualties took place. While walking along, a family with young chi
ldren also walked past. One young boy playfully tossed seashells into the surf, and drew pictures in the sand. As I watched the peaceful scene before me I thought, “Does this young boy know the story of this beach? Does he know the blood that was shed here in violence so that he could play in peace?” It is a story I hope no one forgets so it won’t have to happen again.I’ll write more later about the work week and my mid-trip weekend.
Pictures of the trip are at http://scottshots4.shutterfly.com/479
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