PrettyGrlzMakeGraves

I like France, but the wild one, not touristic Paris, though the city is really interesting and amazing. French villages and little cozy towns, its citizens and their life seem to me more attractive. I wanted to tell you about one episode of my last summer bicycle tour through Normandy, the province in the north of France. D-Day Beaches - the famous place on the ocean side, where the landings of Allied Forces took place in 1944 during the World War II. The invasion started on July the 6th; it led to the liberation of France and the whole Europe. This is the place of power and sorrow the land stained with blood, stuffed with shell fragments, courage, hate and death. And when you are there, you can feel it deeply.

I stayed in Bayeux, a classic French small town, full of nice houses and medieval churches. Early in the morning I grabbed my bike and took a bus to the starting point of my tour at Utah Beach. That’s the place where US 4th Infantry Division landed that critical day. More than 3000 soldiers were killed here. It’s strangely peaceful now - white rocks; hills, overgrowned withered grass; wide sandy beaches and blue waves of the Atlantic. I climbed on the on the top of the cliff nearby the old concrete German bunker, that is a part of the Hitler's Atlantic Wall, you can see the kilometers of endless grey ocean water and a thin yellow line of the banks. Salty wind and heat make you feel giddy. And the atmosphere of the place puts a great pressure on you.

If you are going to ride a bike here, I’d recommend you to take a mountain one. I had some problems with my road bike because of its narrow tires; it was uncomfortable to ride rocky trails, and I always was afraid of a puncture. Also you should be ready for the Normandy summer heat and have a hat, sunglasses and a good sun protection cream.

There are a lot of museums and memorials, dedicated to the D-Day, on the Landing shore. One memorial has a sign: 'They did it so that the world could be free.' And it impressed me a lot. One more monument that really excites is the Omaha Beach D-Day Memorial, that stands in sands of the wide white coastline looking like a lunar surface. The monument is made in a form of steel splashes, and when there's a tide, waves fill the beach and the splashes reflects in water. One more fascinating place to visit is the Normandy American Cemetery near Colleville-sur-Mer. Straight rows of graves, thousands of white headstones on the tidy loans are thought-provoking.