Thursday, June 20, 2019
Our first outing today was actually within walking distance…The Bayeux Tapestry. This is a 69m Medieval hand embroidered tapestry telling the long story of William the Conqueror’s English invasion. The detail of the embroidery was amazing. However cameras were not allowed so no pictures.
On our walk back to the hotel we walked past the Notre Dame Cathedrale we saw last night and it was open and so we stopped and lit a candle in memory of our Dad.
And then we were off to Carentan and the D-Day Experience. There are three parts to this museum. First we watched a 50-minute 3-D movie about D-Day with what seemed like airplanes flying right at us. Then the guys rode in a C-47 flight simulator that took them through a 7-min crash landing on Omaha Beach. The women chose to sit this one out. We ended with going through the “Dead Man’s Corner” Museum. This is the location where a light tank was hit and the entire crew died. The tank commander was left hanging outside the turret for four days thus the location was named Dead Man’s Corner.
Our last stop of the day was in St. Mere Eglise to see the church where a US Paratrooper, John Steele, got his parachute hooked on the steeple of the church. He hung there for two hours before he was captured by the Germans only to escape four days later.
But here’s the amazing part of the day. We were looking for a restaurant on the way to St. Mere Eglise and we stopped at one but it was closed. So we continued on, saw some restaurants, pulled into a parking lot, looked up and there was the church we were looking for right in front of us. So we went across the street to eat first and there at a table are two men, one of them an elderly man wearing a 101st Airborne hat. We stopped to greet him and struck up a conversation about our Dad in the 101st. It turned out that this man was Bob Noody a member of the 101st who is in an infamous picture that was taken just before he flew to Normandy. We had seen this picture numerous times in the museums we visited and here he was sitting right in front of us. We had a conversation about what our Dad was involved in and he shook his head yes to all of it! Along with him was a gentleman who was a WWII expert just like Erwin that we met in Eerde. In fact he knows Erwin. So if we had eaten at the other restaurant none of this would have happened. It is how we started this journey and now how we were ending it.
So our last meal together tonight was down our street again. All three nights we were visiting by this roaming cat which we nicknamed “Norman” short for Normandy.
And so the end of another long day.
In Our Father's Footsteps 