Well, we got to take a little summer vacation a couple weeks ago, although we didn’t stray too far from home. Normandy is a region in France and is probably best known for it’s important battles in WWII. I thought it would be a great opportunity to see the area and teach some pretty important things to the boys. We left in the morning and arrived just after noon in the town of Caen. The town was heavily bombed during the war but somehow the Chateau/fortress of William the Conqueror (moat included) was left untouched. So we got to see that which was built almost 1000 years ago. It was really neat. Let me try to tell you about our trip through pictures.

Here is a picture of the boys trying to get the cannons to work on the grounds of William the Conqueror

The Cathedral

One of the places we made sure we went to was the American D-Day Memorial. It was definitely pretty powerful and even the boys felt something there.

Below are the flags of the allies

It was very interesting to see this. I wondered what Ian was thinking.

I was looking at some of the things when Ian all of the sudden called me, “Mom! Come here!”, so I go to see what’s up and he is standing in this hallway. It is very cold and there is nothing in it, but there are speakers that are saying the names of everyone who died. He was very moved by this and he asked me if these were the people who died. “Yes Ian, they are.” He asked, “Will we ever have a war like this again?”, I told him that I hoped not. He knew his Daddy went to war and I had no doubt this was on his mind. He brought it up several times over the course of the trip. After this hallway there were pictures of people with their story. He was VERY interested in this and he wanted to know what kind of “brave things” they did. So I spent the time to show him that it was okay to die for your country. I’ve never been one to sugar coat things so they don’t sound as bad, although I will avoid the gory details at all cost. It was all very heavy.

After we went through the Memorial we went to the cemetary where almost 10,000 soldiers are buried. It was a really neat site. The cemetary overlooks the ocean. Ian made the observation that it would be a great place to be buried. I agreed.

Abram started hugging the grave markers

Over the course of the days we visited several D-Day beaches. Here are some views of the cliffs from Omaha Beach.

We went to the top of the cliffs and the landscape was incredible. There were a ton of bunkers there and giant craters where artillery shells had fallen. The boys had fun running in them.

This used to be an archway but was bombed heavily

Every night we ended our evening on the beach watching the sunset.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 3:53 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.