Our Trip to France (by Jon)

We had a great time in Paris! We had seven days there, actually 10 if you count the three days my mom, brother, and I (Jon) spent there. We saw all of the important must-see sights such as the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Louvre Museum, Place de la Concorde, the Notre Dame Cathedral, and even went on a Seine River boat tour through the city. On our second day, we went on a car tour of the city. However, our driver couldn’t speak English, so Stephanie became our tour guide and informed us the historical significance of each sight we were visiting. On New Year’s Eve we took a train outside of Paris to Versailles, where we toured the Palace of Versailles. However, it was an intensely cold and dreary day, and it was hard to see the beauty of the famous gardens.

My favorite part of the trip was our two-day excursion to Normandy to visit the D-Day beaches. We visited a number of the small French coastal towns that had historical significance to D-Day. We toured a museum at Arromanches on Gold Beach, one of the British invasion beaches. Arromanches is where the Allies built “Port Winston,” a brain-child of Churchhill that enabled supplies and machinery to be sent to France.

We spent one night at Lion D’Or, a famous bed and breakfast in a coastal town called Bayeaux. This B&B is where President Eisenhower, Churchill, and Charles DeGaulle stayed on a number of occasions. My parents actually were assigned the room where and Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, used to stay in.

We walked around in the town of St. Mere Eglise, the first town liberated by the Allies on June 6, 1944. This town is famous because it’s where a company of the 82^nd Airborne Division accidentally landed into heavy German fire the night before D-Day. One American landed on the town’s church and was actually hanging from the church steeple (He miraculously survived the ordeal).

We drove through the town of Carentan, which was liberated by Easy Company on June 12, 1944, as made famous by the documentary, Band of Brothers. We then visited Pointe Du Hoc, a cliff-top location situated between Utah and Omaha Beach. Several groups of Rangers had to scale these cliffs the morning of D-Day to eliminate important German guns. The crazy thing about Pointe du Hoc is there are still huge craters in the ground from the Allied bombings. The craters were often as deep as sand traps on golf courses.

After checking out the town of St. Laurent-sur-Mer in the middle of Omaha Beach, we visited the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. The American government maintains this beautiful cemetery, which consists of about 9,400 burials of American soldiers, each with a marble white cross. It was sad to see how many soldiers survived D-Day, but died a month or two later.
Our trip to France was fun and we loved the experience. Maybe we can do it again someday.