Onward to Bloddy Omaha

Whew. I made it a whole 30 km today. That’s right folks, almost 20 miles! Wow! Well, whatcha gonna do man. I’m in the middle of the biggest invasion beach in history. I’m going to stop and smell the roses. Which, by the way, smell pretty much like cow poop. I’m in farm country, and it’s evident.
No matter, smells like home anyway. So much to tell, but so hard with a group of American twentysomethings partying next to my campsite. If I didn’t now I was physically in France, I would think I was camping at the Seaside or something. Ok, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em right?

Ok, I’m back. Wow. Let me start over.

Omaha Beach. This is where it all started. In a sense, this is where I first meet up with Grandpa. He came across right here, in Dog White sector on D-plus 90 or so or late September 1944. All troops and equipment for the war in the ETO came across this beach after the successful allied invasion on June 6th, 1944.
What most people don’t realize, or even know, is that this section of the Normandy beaches is a resort area. It has been for centuries. More recently, it’s a place where people have come to have good seafood, and get some sun. And sun there is! It must have been around 85 degrees today and sunny with little or no wind. Perfect beach weather. The water was as blue as the sky and it was hard to tell where the horizon met.
I cycled up the highway from Carentan this morning, after a minor freak out with Bank of America turning off my only remaining card and spending a long time buying essentials like sun block. Man, I get burned quick, and to be honest I didn’t expect the weather to be this nice. I am prepared for rain and winter. In fact, half my load is water proof layers for me and the panniers.
It’s easy to see why cycling is the national sport of France. It’s a country made for it. Of course it helps that everything is really close together having spent a couple of thousand years being without cars and airplanes. It’s closeness, as well as it’s history are something that it must be hard for Americans to understand. You can easily cycle 20 miles, like I did today, and be in 5 or 10 different villages complete with their own medieval church and several thousand distinct Pattiseries.
It’s also easy to see why France is a culture which holds modernity at arms length. There is a cultural shunning of chain stores, car parks, and malls. The individual shop is king here. Bucher for meat products, bakery for bread, bar for beer and liquor, restaurant for food and wine. All of these places have nothing else. You can’t expect to walk into a bakery and get a cup of coffee.
Along with this separate way of doing things, goes a public awareness of what it acceptable behavior. One doesn’t, for instance, order a coffee to go and then attempt to bike away while drinking it. This is, of course, exactly what I was looking for this morning. My American’ness got the better of me after a cold night of being bitten by mosquitoes in my sleeping bag on the hard ground. Side note to self; bring a therma-rest on the next bike trip and damn the weight.
When I finally got out of town, I was confronted with a massive interstate highway that my map told me was the way to Grandcamp-Maisy which is the beginning of Omaha Beach. Any thoughts I was having about continuing down the French equivalent of I-5 were quickly drowned out by the several trucks which honked me out of my map reading reverie. I realized that I was standing in the middle of a roundabout. Not good. So, I hauled quickly out of traffic toward what I took to be an overpass.
On the other side, much to my delight, was a little country road complete with ancient stone chateaus on either side pointing in the general direction of the beach and paralleling the freeway. Thinking that it may well have been a good thing that I brought the plastic compass Dad gave me for the trip, I swallowed and headed off map hoping that I wouldn’t have to retrace my steps back up the slow downhill grade to the freeway overpass.
The gamble was well rewarded at the next little crossroads when I saw a sign for Grandcamp-Maisy and St-Laurent Sur-Mer smiling at me. After a quick bar adjustment, I grabbed a wonderfully delicious Norman apple and pedaled slowly down the road through rolling hills and lush farmland. Again, I felt at home on these fields. With every whiff of cow crap and rotting grass field it seemed I was running close to the place of my childhood. A faint smell of smoke filled the air, it was field burning season after all.
After far too quick a ride, and crossing the interstate again, I came to a roundabout with a sign pointing to the beach. It said Omaha Memorial 6km. I was so close I could feel it. I have always wanted to come here. Here where the hatred of Adolf Hitler was finally challenged on the ground. Here were the sea ran red with allied blood. Here where grandpa first touched European soil.
Ok, it wasn’t that romantic. I started seeing tour buses filled with middle-aged Americans. Some where perhaps old enough to have been children during the war but most where baby boomers. Maybe they were doing the same thing I was. Maybe they were looking for their past. Like so many in America, we all are looking back now rather than forward.
This little patch of France has essentially become America in a way. In fact, the land on which the thousands lie in repose at the American Cemetery is technically American soil. This is true in fact, but also in deed I noticed as I witnessed the large rented campers aimlessly swerving all over the road. Rather than the usual French bicycle courtesy of slowing down and getting over to pass me, the Americans behind the wheel whizzed by like I was in Wyoming on I-90.
It was also great to see the biggest RV stopped in the middle of the highway with the hazards on while a large and quite perturbed looking American couple tried to figure out a French map inside. I waved while passing and received a nod from the man. It reminded me of the nod given between gunslingers in Tombstone.
Down on the beach, I was rewarded for my persistence. After a long and gratifying downhill run here during which I hit just over 50 kph (sweet!), I arrived exhausted and ready for food. Finding an empty bench along a wall, I set down the bike and broke open my French bread/cheese/salami for some open faced sandwiches. Water and bread sandwiches never tasted so good! Plus, I lifted some butter from the hostel back in Cherbourg!
Butter and meat and cheese are all ok when you’re touring. This is why I love this sport. You burn three to four thousand calories per day so you can pretty much eat whatever you want. In fact, I look at it like putting fuel in the tank. It’s a double win because instead of loading up liters of fuel for hundreds of dollars, you get to eat good food and burn it on the ride. In this line of thought, you actually get your cake (which I love) and eat it too.
When I finished my lunch, I looked up (probably quite animal-like) and realized that I was seated next to an old German pillbox. There was a stone sea-wall, and above on the cliff another pill box. A quick scan to my right revealed a long sandy beach, with a continuous stone seawall, running up to a series of low grassy bluffs with houses built below. These were obviously new houses, due to there materials and style, so they were not there in 1944.
It was only when I walked over to a sign post that I saw a famous photo of D-Day where troops have just taken a pillbox next to a stone wall. It’s been all over the news, and in most history books. I had just eaten a peaceful lunch next to one of the world’s most potent symbols for violence.
American men in there 50’s strolled by getting their bored wives to take photos of them smiling in front of these many remnants of Hitler’s vaunted sea wall defenses. It was like they had taken these strong-points themselves.
No French people I have met along this trip have been rude to me, or anything other than helpful and polite. I point this out because I was in dire need to post my work online and make a few emails. This is a small town part of the country, so there are no internet cafes, or Cybercafe, in French.
After riding up and down the beach, I parked my horse at a bar right next to the monument at Dog White Sector and went inside to inquire about getting online. The well worn looking barmaid opened the conversation when she saw me fumbling with my French book.

“Bonjour! English is ok with me!”
“Bonjour. Thank God. Merci Boucoo.” I replied in horrible French. Side note to self again, learn French before coming to France next time.
She looked at me knowing that I was trying. “Pour Qua Messieur?”
“I need to get to the internet, you know….Le Cybercafe?”
“Oh. Non. None here”
“crap”, she could sense my need and my desperate circumstance.
“But it you wait for my husband, he will help you. Ok?”
“Merci Boucoup!”

A strung-out looking guy in his fifties came over and led me upstairs to a plush room filled with couches overlooking my parked bike and the roundabout next to the beach memorial. He plugged in his router, and told me plug in my machine. During the course of waiting for my ancient Pentium 3 laptop to fire up, he told me his name was Bo and he was a screenplay writer. When I asked what he had written, he replied that probably nothing I would know. German and Spanish TV shows, cheap French Cinema, but he was hoping for an Oscar someday. “Well, really just to be nominated is such an honor. To win, well that’s something else.” Everyone in France is an artist.
When I rode out, after leaving the bar maid 5 Euro for her trouble and for refilling my water bottles, I found a quaint camping spot overlooking the beach. It’s actually on a bluff, complete with German bunkers, commanding a direct line of fire down below. During the war, it must have been strong point. Now it’s a family campground. There is even a bunker sitting just behind me as I write this in the grass watching the full moon rise over the English Channel. It’s now used as a sort of garden shed for storing fencing material. Hell, it’s good concrete and it’s not going anywhere. Why not?
After settling in, and taking a well deserved shower, I walked out to find a carload of Americans setting up a tent and loudly talking. I met eyes with a guy who had a beard and there was a moment of pause bordering on awkwardness.

“Sup dude?” I said.
“Nothing, sup up with you?” He replied. A bond had been formed.


Later as I shared their free BBQ hotdogs and bottle of champagne, I came to realize just how weird this little encounter was. Not only were they Americans, but they were from Washington State, Enumclaw to be precise. A name on the signs next to I-5 that I used to pass many times a year on my way up to see family in Seattle.
Mike and Katy were living in Paris and working for a bicycle tour company that mainly catered to American tourists and Tim and Elizebeth where on vacation from Washington. We sat and talked. It felt good to speak English with some folks from home. Not just that, it felt great to talk to people from the NW. There’s a certain vibe.
As we ate and got comfortable with each other, as well as a little drunker, I started to see the other campers looking in our direction tellingly. A little later, as we watched a French couple take a bucket down to the water, Mike commented on how proper the French were.
“They’ve got there little buckets and their hats with the feather in them when they go camping. They do things all proper.”
As the sun slowly set on new friends, we were sitting on top of that highest bunker that I’d seen from below at lunch. We were a little drunk and talking loudly about Arrested Development. How weird, I thought, that we can all sit at one of the most sacred places in our history and talk about such frivolous things. The French were below clamming with there buckets and we were above drinking and talking about TV.
I had to ask myself what more the people who had died on D-Day would have wanted. Ultimately, they gave there lives for our future. They died so that we could sit on top of that bunker and drink while making fun of French people clamming. If that sounds frivolous, it is not intended to. It merely points out the fact that freedom is different for everyone. How we choose to live and play are our rights as people, and it is for this that D-Day happened.
I can only hope that we live long enough to make sure that young people remember this in a meaningful way. I can easily state that these four folks I made friends with were the only younger people on this beach today.