Day 7

Wednesday started early as we got on the bus at 7am. It took about 2 hours to get to Mont St. Michel which was our first stop of the day. Mont St. Michel is a castle-esque monastery that is out in the middle of nowhere. It is up on a hill, and in the morning/afternoon it is in the middle of a dessert (ish). But in the evening, the water rises a couple of feet per hour, and it looks like an island. We didn't get to see the island part, but we saw pictures.



Inside the walls, there was a little town. There was one main street with shops. We had to climb a bunch of stairs up to the monastery to take a tour.

Next we went inside to take a tour. I wasn't super interested in any of the history. You pretty much just need to know that it's a monastery and has been there for a long time.

This is a big wheel that they used to bring the bricks up to build the top of the monastery. I think that they used to use the monastery as a prison, and the prisoners would rotate the wheel.

There were a lot of chimneys inside the monastery.
They were very large. I looked up it for fun.

After our tour, we got a little bit of free time to shop on the main street. There were a lot of places that sold replica weapons. I don't know why, but there were a bunch. All of the stores were very similar. Very touristy. We then hopped on the bus and started towards Normandy which was another couple of hours. We actually spent a little more time at Mont St. Michel than planned bc Normandy had gotten a lot of snow, and some of the roads were down.

Here some pictures of the Normandy countryside (as well as i could take them).

The first thing we went to was Omaha Beach (the one from Saving Private Ryan). They have a memorial/museum there that we looked at first, and then walked by the cemetery and down to the beach.
I didn't take many pictures in the museum bc it was mainly just readings and videos of WW2.

After our free time to roam around, we met at the flag poles in the cemetery for a flag-lowering ceremony. They had a couple people from our group fold it up, and then they played taps during the lowering of the second one.

After the memorial, we drove to a spot were there were some standing German strongholds. Unfortunately the bus could not get there bc the roads were too snowy.

We then rode to museum with a bunch of artillery guns. The museum was closed, but it was pretty small, and they had a lot of guns outside. They also had large cement blocks called mulberry's that were on the beach and in the water. These blocks were floated over from Great Britain as ramps to make unloading mobile vehicles from boats easier.

After this museum/beach, we drove another 2 hours to a hotel. We all walked to the McDonalds nearby bc that was the only open restaurant. It was a lot like ours here, except they had electronic ordering stations which were in many different languages. That really helped. We all went to bed after that.