On the road (2) – beaches, castles and chateaux COMPLETED IN THIS FORUM - Page 7 - PassPorter - A Community of Walt Disney World, Disneyland, Disney Cruise Line, and General Travel Forums
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And yes this was for one of the British landings. Mind you, the American beach we saw (Omaha) was sandy as well...
I think we went to Omaha but there are so many we may not have. We couldn't actually go down to the beach on our visit but I remeber there being pretty big cliffs and a small area of beach.
I think we went to Omaha but there are so many we may not have. We couldn't actually go down to the beach on our visit but I remeber there being pretty big cliffs and a small area of beach.
As always - great pictures!
that sounds about right - there are big cliffs and then a small area of sandy beach. Keep tuned - you'll see that in due course!
Saturday 5 June – part six: an artificial harbour from the Second World War
Our next stop was to see the memorial for the Royal Winnipeg Rifles. Again, the beach was packed here, although it didn’t detract from the feeling of the nearby memorial. By now, I have to be honest and the intense heat and the lack of a breeze was really getting to me and I was starting to feel very tired.
We headed back to the car and back on the road and skipped a few monuments, as I didn’t want to kill myself on day one. : On the way to our next stop, we saw some beautiful villages, some more jeeps (I told you there’d be more ) and, of course, a few more moo, moos and mooeys....
Our next stop was an unexpected one, but we noticed that there was a huge car park and a fair few monuments, so we decided to stop there. Although the parking cost us €2 ($2.40), which was the first time we’d had to pay for parking all day (we were very impressed by all the free parking we’d had so far today), it was worth it. We headed down first towards the cliff top, and my goodness, you could get right up to the edge of the cliff. Not a place to take kids. :
We got some superb photos from there of Mulberry Harbour, otherwise known as Port Winston, around Gold Beach. This is the artificial harbour that the British created, as the then Prime Minister Winston Churchill realised that they would need to do that to be able to get to the beaches, hence the Port Winston name. It was fascinating to see so many of them still in place and you could easily imagine the whole harbour out there from what was left. I couldn’t believe how close some of them were to the beach, with families playing happily on it. It just seemed like an odd situation.
Once again, we saw the Hercules circling above us as we stood there, which seemed very fitting.
From there, we wandered around the rest of the site, getting photos of the other memorials there.
Then we headed up the observation tower to get some photos of the area beneath us. Once again, the heat was beating me, so I headed back to the car to cool down, with Mark following a few moments later.
We had been thinking of going to a museum, but we both agreed that there was no substitute for seeing things first hand and neither of us felt that we were going to learn that much more from any museum, so we decided to head for the hotel instead.
We headed first through Arromanches, which was closed off, not due to the D-Day celebrations ironically enough, but because they had a triathalon there. We’d already seen the runners going through the site we’d just stopped in and I assume that perhaps the cycling was taking place in the town centre.
Once again, as we drove along, we saw a mixture of stunning villages, the sort you’d expect from rural France, World War II jeeps and of course, just one or two cows...
I was surprised the thrill I got seeing this picture. This was my dad's paratroop group, although I don't think he was division 82. He participated in the Battle of the Bulge, but not D-Day.
What great updates and the pictures are amazing. What beautiful memorials and tributes,very moving. It is so strange as you look at the pictures of the beaches, and then think to how it must have been during the war, the soliders heading off the ships, the fierce battles that they faced just trying to move farther up the beach.
Cheryl, what amazing pictures! It always strikes me how much the "real" structures in Europe look so much like the "fake" structures at the Disney parks...well, vice versa really! Thanks so much for all the wonderful pictures and stories you always provide for your trips!
I noticed what I think is a Disney connection in one of your pictures. In the left part of the plaque/map of Utah Beach is the town of Isigny. Isn't that where Walt Disney's family was from! His original family name was D'Isigny, right? I hope I'm not confusing that with something else!
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that sounds about right - there are big cliffs and then a small area of sandy beach. Keep tuned - you'll see that in due course! 
: On the way to our next stop, we saw some beautiful villages, some more jeeps (I told you there’d be more 
) and, of course, a few more moo, moos and mooeys.... 
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