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France - Day Four

Day four:

 Today we bid adieu to the beautiful city of Paris.  While we were able to enjoy both scheduled programming as well as ample "free time" to explore the city over the last three days, it is now time to travel west.  Once checked out of the hotel, we were greeted by our long-distance bus driver, Jean Jacques, who will be our driver for the remainder of the trip.


 We hit the road early with plans to head straight to Normandy but our travel guide Deb had a wonderful surprise for us, a stop in the northern French town of Bayeux.  
A quaint little town, Bayeux is home to the Bayeux Tapestry, a 1,000 year-old hand-embroidered cloth 230 feet long and 20 inches tall that depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England.  We were in Bayeux primarily for a quick lunch and shopping stop but many members of our group decided to use the time to view the amazing Tapestry, which was inscribed as a UNESCO Memory of the World in 2007.

 After our quick stop in Bayeux, we continued our journey west to what will be for most of us the most memorable stop of our trip, the American Military Cemetary and Monument at Omaha Beach.
It was on this very solemn site that the Allied Forces landed on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.  Our visit began with some time spent in the Visitor's Center, which houses numerous exhibits as well as a theater showing On Their Shoulders, which can be viewed here.  From the Visitor's Center, we were lead out to the top of the bluff overlooking Omaha on our way to the Cemetary which contains the gravesites of more than 9,380 Americans, most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings and subsequent operations.
We were honored to witness the Taps Ceremony after which we made our way down to Omaha Beach to walk the sands that, for thousands, met their last steps on that fateful day.  After our truly inspiring visit to Normandy, we once again boarded the bus to head to our hotel, the Mercure Saint-Malo Fronte de Mer. 

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