Reconnaissance to Bayeux

Tuesday 7th April 2009

We managed a small sleep in, but people having a conversation outside our room door made it difficult, combined with an annoying "bom bom bom bom" from train station across road . I grabbed a quick breakfast of jambon and gruyere baguette , while Dan had a quiche, then we were back on the train to Bayeux. In what we saw in the hour yesterday we thought Bayeux was a cute little town and wanted to go back and explore more.

We went straight to the Bayeux tapestry. It's a bit unknown why it was made, but it is many hundreds of years old. It's a 70m long embroidery showing how William the Conqueror become a conqueror. We walked along listening to our audioguide describe every scene, fascinating. We then went upstairs the museum to learn a little more about the fabric. The thing I liked was the troubled life it has had. One story told about how the tapestry had been used as a tarp to cover guns on a cart during the French revolution.

After the tapestry we went to the Notre Dame de Bayeux; A very large and impressive church in the centre of town. They were doing lots of restoration works though and couldn't get inside though. It was here that I decided that I needed to go to the toilet. There were some public toilets nearby so I ducked in quickly, and walked out just as fast. It was a toilet shaped thing built into the floor which I supposed just covered a hole in the ground. It wasn't plumbed at all, no flush, no toilet paper, and it STUNK. I didn't need to go quite that badly.

We stopped off for lunch in a little café, before trekking across town to find the British war cemetery and memorial. On top of the memorial there was and inscription in Latin of something along the lines of "William conquered England, and now the English have liberated his people" - we learnt that at the Bayeux tapestry! This cemetery holds over 2000 soldiers, mainly British but there is a few other nationalities buried there too. There are 17 Aussies buried amongst them. We managed to find 2 of them.

From here we dashed back to the train station to catch the 3.30pm train back to Caen. We decided that we'd like to find the Caen War memorial. We'd seen signs for it in town, but thought that the adventure of taking the 'tram' would be more fun. I don't like the term tram for them because they weren't real trams. They had bus tyres on them, but ran on tracks, weird. We managed to figure out how to buy tickets and jumped on one into the city. Dan had planned the trip (and ignored my requests to get off at a particular stop) and told me where to get off so we could transfer to get a bus up to the war museum. All I'm going to say is that he stuffed up. And it just happened that as soon as we got off the tram it was the time it decided to start pelting down with rain. We had no idea where to catch the bus from, and we were soaking wet. I made a decision to just start walking in the right direction until we found a bus stop - we were already wet by this stage it couldn't have gotten much worse. I eventually found a correct bus stop and we huddled in until the bus came. By the time the bus dropped us off at the museum the sun was shining and the sky was blue. Just our luck!

We walked through the impressive looking museum, first watching a film on d-day and WWII, then walked through the extensive exhibitions. Finally a place that recognised that there was more to the war than D-Day. I even saw things to do with Nazi's, concentration camps, Stalin, Mussolini etc. And at 6.04pm France time, I declared a truce on any more related things. I had definitely had enough.

We caught a bus back into town in the search of dinner. We found a lovely brassiere, which had a icecream shop next door, which Dan had already decided we'd have for dessert. This was probably the most yummy dinner we had of the entire trip. Dan had a steak with a camembert sauce, and I had a pasta. I had my eye on a Crème Brulee for dessert from the restaurant, but Dan wouldn't budge on the icecream place next door. I gave in, we paid and walked out, only to find the icecream shop was now shut. Dan had his heart set on glacee, but we couldn't find any shops that were still open. Oh well, he went without. He should've just listened to me!

From here it was back to the hellhole, I mean hotel, to pack up ready to leave Normandy tomorrow morning.