05-25 Yep, ANOTHER Train Ride

Nothing much happened today except we traveled on a train from Caen, France to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. So, you get to hear about train traveling.

We went down to breakfast this morning. It's like most, but less; and there's no one there. Totally self serve; very limited in items, but enough. Karen has two boxes of Kellogg's Coco Krispies. All of the cereals on the breakfasts so far have been Kellogg's. She has milk on it, a glass of water and a yogurt. I have my normal croissant(s), a bowl of fruit and two glasses of juice. For that they charged us $9€ each. Ouch. l usually ask at check-in is breakfast included. Most of the places we choose include it, but we made this reservation at the last minute in Bayeux so we payed the piper.

We caught the train from Caen to Paris today at 10am walking to the station. We get a reservation because it's only $1.50€ each extra with our EuroRail Pass for a reserved seat on this train. Some of the trains here are so crowded and this isn't even the peak season. But peak season is getting closer now. Having a reservation for a seat makes life more pleasant and less stressful.

I've got the laptop out with power (power comes with first class; sometimes it works, sometimes not). I'm working on a Zermatt blog today. Since Karen is seated next to me she gets to see the pictures!! As she would say, "Ahh the MATTERHORN!!!"

We arrive at Paris St. Lazare train station and we figure out where to go. There's like an entire town, down underground in Paris. Its not like the NY subway where you go down and you have maybe four choices of where to go. In NYC you have to decide which side of the track to go to on in order to go the direction you want.

Under Paris you've got maybe six different directions to go in all and maybe up to 4 or 5 different trains coming through to different places. You have to read all the signs and sometimes the sign is slightly around a corner. Then you've got food locations and store signs that clutter up your reading. We weeded our way through all this and bought a subway ticket only to just miss the train. No big deal normally but the next one didn't come for 30 minutes. That means we won't make it to our next train in the Paris Nord station.

After we arrived at Nord we got lunch and found a place to eat it. Found the next train and it didn't have any stops until the airport so we got here just a few minutes later then we expected.

Found the free hotel shuttle. Goes to several hotel; ours, All Seasons Roissey, was first. Saw this great looking airplane taking off on the way there. Hey, wait a minute. Those don't fly anymore!

Arrive at the hotel at 3pm. Small, modern room. Window doesn't open but the fan works. NOT. They, the motels, say they have A/C and they do, but the question I've found out you should ask is, "What month do you turn on your A/C"?????

Went out to dinner at 5:30. The guy at the front desk told us where to go. Had a good calzone then walked back home.

Tomorrow we get to go on a new roller coaster at Parc Asterix about 10 miles north of our hotel.

05-24 Educational Day at Caen Museum

It is time to move again. Going 20 minutes up the train tracks to Caen for one day.

We caught the 9:21am train into Caen, then walked five blocks to our hotel. Our room is not ready but we leave our bags there. We take the tram into downtown and transfer to the correct bus going the wrong way! I couldn't find the chart on the bus wall telling us the stops so we go all the way to the end of the line and have to go all the way back past where we got on and then to the other end of the line where our museum sits. Heavy sigh.

Finally made it to the Caen Museum about 11:15. This museum covers conflict in the 20th century with emphasis on WWII. It had so much information and was very full of school groups all day.

It is a difficult museum to rate highly. It is full of great information and some of the story telling elements are unusual but in places the telling was out of order. You'd be going along in 1943 and then panels for 1941 about Japan would show up. Very confusing.

Most of the exhibits were below the entrance level, so the explanation of how World War II starts is show by mentally and physically "spiraling" you down to the lower level. This is the entrance level.

Many of the historic video areas did not have sound probably because there would be so many nationalities viewing the exhibit.

They showed two movies in different theaters that were just poorly done. Each time I was just dumbfounded at how bad the movie I just saw really was.

It did have some cool maps showing where the various troops started and where they went from England to the Normandy area of France. All of the unit numbers were on the maps so if you knew someone in a certain unit you could follow them from England across the Channel to Europe.

Here is a fairly clear map showing most of the elements of D-Day. The water is WHITE (not your standard map/water color. What were they thinking). The top of the map is North. England is north as well. You can see where this museum is in Caen. Bayeux, where we started yesterday's tour is close to the center. The American Cemetery is in Colleville-sur-Mer. Isigny-sur-Mer, Walt Disney's namesake, is just down the road to the left of Bayeux. The paratrooper caught on the church steeple was in Ste-Mere-Eglise. If memory serves me this map showed how much ground we had captured (in orange) by the end of the day on D-Day.

They also showed the items the soldiers and medics carried with them.

Some areas of France had been occupied for four years by the time England, United States and Canada came to help. Amazing to think about what their lives were like during that time and it's easy to see why they were so happy to see us. Of course, it probably didn't hurt that we were giving out these goodies.

Outside they had memorial gardens dedicated to each of the three countries. At the USA one there was a plaque representing each state that sent troops. All 50 states sent men to fight in the war.

It should be telling that we have more pictures of the outside of the museum than of the inside.

One thing that WAS really cool was that they had an actual Bailey Bridge to the elevator that took you to the outside gardens. These British-designed bridges were used extensively in WWII by the Allies. What made them important was that you could use available manpower and not a crane to build the bridge and they could support the weight of a tank. These bridges kept the armies moving even after the Germans had destroyed existing bridges over rivers.

In looking back through the few pictures that we took I came across one that I took because it summed up the entire war to me in just one sentence:

"The Allies fought for a world vision totally opposed to that which the Axis wished to impose by force."

On the way home we tried dinner at "Quick Drive" the French version of McDs. Had a Long Bacon Burger and an Oreo milk shake. Karen was not impressed. McDs burgers are better and the Oreo shake was just a vanilla shake with crushed Oreos on top. Got back to the room about 7pm.

Tonight's dance floor