End of day 14 at our rental home Le Nid du Merle, the blackbird’s nest.

The Bayeux Cathedral

Bayeux was the first French city liberated by the 1944 invasion of Normandy. A millennium before the Normans invaded the other way, crossing the English Channel for William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, to claim the English crown promised to him by his cousin Edward the Confessor upon his royal death. Harold broke his promise to William and claimed the crown for himself. It cost him his life and the victor went from Bastard to Conqueror. The writing of history is afforded the winners and their exquisite record, the Bayeux Tapestry, unspools for many meters like a propaganda movie of justification. It is beautiful all the same and we saw it in Bayeux.

La Pointe du Hoc. The Germans had a commanding observation point here. Army rangers scaled the cliff to assault the outpost. Half of the hundred died.

Mimi at Omaha Beach.

This is the American cemetery on the bluff above the beaches of the Operation Overlord invasion of Normandy June 6, 1944.

My Uncle Joseph Coates Jr. came ashore in the third wave. He was one of 40 percent of the invasion force on Omaha Beach who did not die or was wounded. He returned here in 2004 with his fellow survivors.

Norman peace clouds chase us home.

”tis a two picture day. We spent half of it sorting out a course correction. We are abandoning the plan for Belgium and Holland and staying in France another week. The rain today is a singular bad weather day and the Caen Memorial provides a half day in a museum history lesson on World Wars One and Two. We gain the context of how Normandy bore the brunt of the casualties of France’s liberation from the Nazis. Contemporary echoes of the rise in fascism in the Twenties and Thirties are shivering the timbers.

Market day

End of journal day 12.
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