Monday is the last touring day, and our target is Bayeux. Tomorrow starts early, as Sam must drive me back to Paris for my flight home, and it’s at least a four-hour trip, depending on traffic. We’re targeting 1100 for a 1400 flight, so there’s room in case of more epic Parisian traffic, like on the way out.
First stop, the Museum of the Battle of Normandy. This is one of the smaller ones, though you wouldn’t know it from the ticket cost, and is located right in the heart of Bayeux. The tickets were 16€ each, but also included admission to the Bayeux Tapestry exhibit and the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Baron-Gérard.
This one had fewer pieces of military equipment inside and a lot more displays of photos with write-ups tracing the (Norman) French experience of the war. There was a 20-minute movie with mostly original footage, which was nice. Of all the museums, this one was by far the most Francocentric. Reading the displays, you’d think The ever-victorious French Army (camped out in England for 4 years) bummed some tanks off the Americans and proceeded to kick the Germans out of Normandy and liberated Paris.
Hmm, I probably should have waited until I cleared security before posting this one…
After that, we tried to drive over to the Bayeux exhibit (it’s in a building across from the cathedral), but…Bayeux wasn’t fought over in the Battle for Normandy. The Germans were too preoccupied with stalling the British and Canadians in Caen to fortify it. Luckily, we still have the amazing cathedral, and, of course, the tapestry. But, that means we also still have a provincial medieval town laid out 1000 years before the invention of the automobile. We tried to find a place to park, but Google tried to kill us twice with bad directions. After a frustrating half-hour squeezing through little streets packed with cars and people, we just went back to the museum and walked. It turned out not to be all that far. We weren’t in a hurry anyway.
The tapestry was as impressive in person as I expected. It was displayed behind glass, on the inner wall of a very dimly lit U-shaped gallery, 30m long. They issued you a small audio recorder that provides information and interpretation on each scene as you pass by. It was a clever idea. The speed of the audio set the pace of everyone’s visit, since it made no sense to go slower or faster; you’d be out of synch. At 71m, it’s long enough that you want to be at the right spot. The line was shoulder-to-shoulder, and it was quite warm in there.
We decided to skip the Baron-Gérard thing, we were very hungry and that wasn’t on the plan anyway. This exposed another annoying idiosyncrasy about France: many of the restaurants close between 1400 and 1700. And yes, it was 1410 when we walked into a pizza place halfway back to the van. So, we went with Plan B, an “English Pub” back down by the Tapestry exhibit.
It turns out that was shuttered and, not just for the afternoon. So, back up the hill towards the van, looking for anything open that’s not pure sugar. Eventually, we found a bar, called The Oasis, that also served pizza. There was the usual weird choices of toppings and I got the jambon (ham).
With that adventure behind us, it was now 1530, and we decided to head back to the hotel and chill. I needed to shoehorn my few purchases into my already aggressively small luggage. It took some doing, but as long as a flight attendant didn’t try to pick up my pack, and realize that despite it’s exactly legal size and shape, it weighed well over the 10kg limit, I would be fine.
TL;DR: The museum is mediocre, but the cathedral and the tapestry are amazing.
Knowing we ate a lot for lunch, and late, we assumed there would be nothing open by the time we might be hungry. So we stopped at a grocery store on the way back to the hotel. We’d get some snack type things that weren’t sugar and just eat those.
That was a bit of an adventure too, as Google chose a store for me about 15 km past the hotel when, we later learned, there was one practically around the corner. Suitably fortified for the evening, we retired.
This day features two galleries. One showcases the usual exhibits, and the other displays military equipment from within and around the museum, serving as a representative sample of the items we’ve encountered in this regard.
| Day 2 Page | Navigation | Day 4 Page |