Blogging from Normandy - The pics

After a very long drive yesterday we are finally home. Unfortunately I was so eager to get the pics off the cameras and have a look through them last night, I managed to wipe one of the SD cards clean. I have no idea what went wrong and it was the card with the most pics on it.

Anyway, here's a small selection of what we have left:



(1)
Although you couldn't smoke inside the boat, the smoking area wasn't so bad. (The blue is the colour of the deck, we're not sinking.)

Our first trip out took us to the Grand Bunker museum on Sword beach (2)



Apparently they are still finding relics along the beaches. The ones at the bottom of the display cabinet were washed up in the last ten years. (4)



This is a mock up of the beach defences leading up to the bunker (3) 


This is a mock up of the inside of the bunker

This original landing craft was restored and used in the film, Saving Private Ryan.



All our pictures of the Merville Battery and Pegasus Bridge were part of those that were lost. The following are somebody elses holiday snaps that I pinched of teh interwebs.

These two are the command bunker at Merville (7)



Pegasus Bridge as it looks today (5)



This was the first house liberated on D-Day. A woman who lived there is still running the place as a cafe.



The original bridge in the museum (6)



A Horsa glider like the ones used to take the bridge in 1944. Most of them broke up on landing as they hit fences and hedgerows



Back to our real photos and this one is Omaha Beach (8)



The visitor centre at the American cemetery. (9) Very informative, very somber.



The graves go on for miles (10)





 

The memorial in the rain



On a lighter note, this is where we stayed. With hindsight I would have picked somewhere with a fridge. Still a comfortable and friendly hotel though.



Sword beach from near the hotel



The ghost town. Not much was ever open



Legoland. (11) The only real restaurant open so this was where we ate. Apparently it means, 'The Seagull'.



The food was top notch. (12)
Most of the food on the menu was in both English and French apart from two dishes. I asked the owner what one of them was but his English was about as good as my French. Beef, he told me. Just 'Beef'. I decided to try it and he came out with half a cow.
Mrs Bucko decided that as I was trying something unknown, she would order the other dish without am English translation and received the fishy delight you see below. She ate that and a dessert before I finished my beef. I had the meat sweats by the time she tucked into her iced cream.
It all went though.



And now we're back home for some English rain. Somehow it seems wetter.

Good times!