I should be in bed but I'm not. We've just spent a week in Normandy, France and I've got so many swirling thoughts and am enjoying the quiet solitude I've missed for the past week havin' been in tight quarters with the fam. We truly had a great time enjoying medieval and WWII sights and I've got the pictures to prove it.
We made this trip rather last minute and it worked. I went into it wishing I'd had a month to read up on everything so I could know what I was going to see. I agonized over it for the two days of packing to make our life portable for a week.
And then we saw a lot of stuff and I learned a lot. On the drive home today, we listened to Stephen Ambrose's D-Day book and I realized I could visualize a lot more since those places weren't just places now, they were experiences I could fathom having seen the lay of the land.
I thought a lot about my Papa being near or in these places. Below is Ryan and I at Utah Beach where he disembarked on August 12, 1944. Boy am I glad he didn't have to go through D-Day on these beaches! He saw enough real war in the months ahead, but seeing and hearing so much of what these soldiers and French civilians experienced that day - I was so glad he missed it! As it was, he was in California on D-Day with his company. They'd gotten orders on June 1 to make their way to New York to then sail for England and then Normandy. He had pretty fond memories of that cross country train ride as I recall, he always did love a road trip!
I sure miss ya, Papa!
