On Thursday morning we departed Paris for Normandy where we would have Bayeux as our home base for four more nights/four full days of touring before returning to Paris to fly home on Sunday. While our Paris time had been self-guided, our Normandy piece was going to be with a private tour guide with Phoenix Custom Tours. Our tour guide/driver until Sunday was a 30-something Hungarian international relations major turned tour guide named Mate' Kalo. After completing graduate studies at American University in Washington DC and getting burned out on the international relations scene, his sister suggested the tour guide career to him as an alternative, and he got connected with the owner of PCT, who himself, was formerly a guide with the company we had booked our ill fated 2020 tour. I found out about him/heard good reviews of his company through fellow disgruntled travelers of the 2020 tours.
Our Paris hotel was next door to a restaurant called La Source, but William called it Cafe Crepes, which I finally realized after a day was because of the two items advertised on the awning: cafe (coffee) and crepes (crepes). I said I was glad our hotel wasn't on the other side where it advertised Cafe - Bier!
I tried hard on the drive out of Paris to get a few final pictures of the La Tour Eiffel, but the cars and the trees kept blocking the perfect shot! It was in my view on the perfect day though my camera never caught it! We just had the perfect fall weather! I can't compliment our time there enough.
The drive to Normandy is around 3 hours. We stopped for lunch en route on at a travel plaza. Mate' came in to translate, but I was fine to order us lunch in French. He was actually shocked, and then for a brief while thought I could speak French even though I told him I couldn't beyond just the basics. I guess my skills at ordering a veggie burger and lasagna were just outstanding!
Our first stop was Caen, which is a town of around 50,000. It has been almost completely rebuilt since WWII. It was severely bombed by the Allied following D-Day. The residents thought the Allies were going to be their saviors from the German occupiers, but it took a month of terror and bombings and there are a lot of mixed feelings about how many civilians were killed to drive out the Germans. In addition to how the communication channels were all intentionally destroyed in the process. We had watched a Josh Gates special about underground caves where residents lived/hid but none of those were available to tour. However. the Caen Memorial Museum is built on top of the underground bunker where German General Richter carried out his command. It was built in a former stone quarry. We were able to tour this before a brief (90 minute) tour of the museum. We could have easily spent 4 hours at the museum had we had the time that day. This was actually the reverse order of how we toured the town. The museum was our last stop before continuing on to Bayeux, but it was what we were thinking of most as we were planning the trip. We actually spent the bulk of the day in the downtown area of town / the old town - the really OLD town.
Caen's city center - versus the parts around the quarry where the museum are built - date back to year 1,000 and William the Conqueror. I remembered some of this from my high school French trip and seeing the Bayeux Tapestry. The castle we toured reminded me of one that should be replicated out of sugar cubes and have a moat made around it. We saw his original burial place in the Men's Abbey in Caen. Supposedly only his thigh bone remains because after 1,000 years lots of plundering has been done during various periods of disrespect. His wife, Matilda, is buried in the Women's Abbey that we did not tour. "Fun fact" that his body was so big that when they tried to stuff it into a coffin that was too small it exploded. He died of a ruptured, infected intestine, so it was already a smelly process.
