Thursday, March 7, 2024
Before I forget to mention it: Happy birthday Kimball! Today he turned 18. I’m so proud of him and love him beyond measure. We celebrated last night with a delicious cake. And today he was my copilot, and we had a great visit.
Now to today:
I’m currently on a metro train. Alone. It’s 11:59pm, and I’ve just had one of the craziest travel days of my life.
Since the purpose of this trip is pilgrimage and sacred travel, I have long wanted to include in it a visit to a place I consider one of the most sacred in all of Europe: the beaches of Normandy where the D-Day invasion took place on June 6, 1944. I’ve wanted to visit this hallowed ground since high school, and it felt wrong to do this trip with this purpose and not go.
The problem is, it’s not exactly on the way to anywhere.
Given the short amount of time we have in France, the train was simply not going to cut it. So I decided to rent a van for today instead. Ok, van is probably too generous a term for the seven seated BMW we got. It was pretty tight quarters but we did all fit.
First, however, I had to get the car. That meant waking up at 5:30am (after a late night) and then making the hour walking and train trip to the Gare du Nord (train station). When I got there, the rental office was closed, so I went to the Eurostar office and booked our train tickets from London to Utrecht (Netherlands) on Monday. Then around 8:30 or 9am I finally got the car.
From there it was another 45-50 min drive through the city to get back to Betty and the kids, who I hoped were waiting for me, but hadn’t responded to their messages.
Turns out, they were almost all asleep, except Betty, who was just getting breakfast. So I rushed into the house, woke up all the kids, and the day I thought would start around 8am, started at 11.
The drive to Omaha beach is really beautiful, and it went pretty smoothly, despite some grumpy and tired members of our family. It’s just long. About 2.5 hours if you take the toll roads -- which we did.
The drive was worth it.
After a brief lunch (packed with love by Dinah), we entered the visitors center.
The American cemetery, visitor’s center, and memorial were all amazing. We’ve been talking with the kids about D-Day for quite a while, and so I felt like they were pretty prepared to take it seriously. There is just no substitute for being in a place. My mom always says that she likes to visit us in our homes so she can picture where we are. I feel something like that here. The visitors center is small, but the exhibits are top notch, and they really give you a sense for what happened there. It’s also sobering to see rows and rows of graves.
Ian was in a pretty dark mood through the visit. I made the mistake last night of showing him just a half a minute of the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. It was too much for him -- and he’s not usually phased by blood. I think being right where it all took place and seeing the photographs and other artifacts was just too much for him.
I hope we can talk about it soon. He wasn’t in much of a taking mood today.
As we were finishing up there, I had in the back of my mind that I really wanted to see Le Mont Saint Michel. It’s a beautiful and very famous monastery on an island about 1.5 hours from Omaha beach. It was one of those moments where I was looking at my watch and calculating in my head if we could go and make it back on time.
I decided to go for it.
It was amazing. We got there just at sunset, and the older 4 and I got out and walked a bit and took some pictures. I’m so grateful I had my long lens with me, and I hope the pictures will do it justice. The light was perfect, and we just enjoyed strolling. Betty stayed in the car with sleeping River in the car.
At some moment I had the thought: “I wonder how long it will take us to get back to Paris.” I had been under the impression that it was about 2.5 hours as well -- because I thought we could take a different route back. Turns out I’m an idiot, and the only way back to Paris was the way we had come. 3.5 hours. That meant we’d be getting back to David and Dinah’s around 10:30, and I’d be hard pressed to get the car back on time and catch the last train back to their house.
Oh, and nobody had eaten since lunch.
Things were tense for a bit, but thankfully we found a McDonalds with a drive through, ordered two 20 piece boxes of chicken nuggets, and we headed back out.
The whole time I was calculating in my head how we were going to get back in time, and the math just didn’t add up. At one point we had decided to just go all together to the train station, drop off the car, and go all the way back on the train, but I really didn’t want to add all that travel time for Betty and the kids.
Thankfully, Dinah came to the rescue again, and she found a place where I could drop off Betty and the kids and she could pick them up. And then I could continue on my way without deviating too much from my path.
The plan worked.
I was able to make it back to the train station in Paris, drop off the car, stress for a couple of minutes because I thought I had lost a credit card, take a pit stop (I’d been holding it since Normandy), and make my train.
Now tomorrow morning we just have to wake up at 5am so we can go back to the train station and go to London.
So, lessons learned:
Traveling with seven is not the same as traveling by myself. We need to slow down or we will burn out before we leave London.
Train travel is cool, but it takes up a ton of time. And it takes way more planning than car travel. In some ways we have freedom, but it’s nothing like the freedom we had when we were traveling by car.
Kids are resilient. They just kind of take everything in stride.
I hope tomorrow goes more smoothly than today.