FRT Day 6: Wandering westward

Today would be our next transition day as we continue westward through Normandy. We are getting quite handy at packing up so we were on the road early for our first destination- Utah beach. The most westerly of the landing beaches, it was the last one to complete our D-Day beach bingo card.

It was the beach with the most visible scars from the engagement. Bits of German bunkers in the dunes and the remains of the floating bridges and heavy machinery ramps still in the water. Yes, there was a museum but we didn’t visit. (Point to note: all the museums tell the same story with the focus on different bits of detail. If you are like us and want the big picture but not the minutiae, then visiting dozens of these places is overload.)

Then we headed inland to Saint Lô, a victim of Allied bombing after the landing. Nearly the entire city was destroyed in the days after so the rebuilt city doesn’t have the same feel as some of the places we’ve been. The cathedral- another Notre Dame! – is the most visible evidence of the destruction and rebuilding. They didn’t try to restore it to its gothic glory. But instead left just one of the two towers of the 14th century building standing and adapted the rest. We weren’t able to visit properly as there was a mass going on so we observed mostly from the outside. There is still a shell casing stuck in the outer wall among all the bullet holes.

But we didn’t stop here just for the WWII history- Saturday is market day!! We explored the streets stalls and let Frank practice his high school French to help me purchase more cheap Italian linen! 😬 We availed ourselves of the gallette food truck and enjoyed a light lunch in the screaming sunshine- ham, cheese, and egg plus mushrooms for Frank if you are curious.

Moving along, we continued westward to the coastal city of Danville, which Google Gemini says is known as the “Monaco of the North”. If you ever wanted evidence of AI hallucinations, read some of Google’s AI summaries for searches!!

It is a very pretty seaside town, with beautiful aquamarine water but not necessarily beautiful beaches. We wandered the ramparts, saw the closing of the market stalls (darn – missed one!) and enjoyed the atmosphere in this lovely place. A couple of ice creams – for which I badly mangled my order because Spanish keeps creeping in! – and it was time to head to our new home base.

We are staying in a fairly new purpose-built cottage outside Mont Saint Michele. It has everything you could ask for including a private deck and washing machine. Clean clothes- yay! We are about 1 km from the car parks for visiting the Mont so there will be walking.

And it will be HOT 🥵! The forecast is for a dangerous heatwave over the remainder of our stay with temps possibly reaching as high as 40! And nothing here is set up for that kind of heat, including our cottage. So we may need to change our plans and do less walking and more relaxing… what a pity!

Data for today: