We spent the French National Holiday exploring the town of Bayeux,our base for our own Normandy campaign. One of the things on my bucket list was spending time at Canadian war memorials – something we didn’t do our first time in Europe 20 years ago. Therefore, northern France (Flanders) and Normandy were important stops this time.
After further exploring Bayeux in the morning, we investigated the Bayeux Tapestry Museum, which has a 70 M (no typo) medieval (1068 CE) tapestry describing the life and times of William the Conqueror. It was pretty amazing to see such an ancient tapestry and to learn about the history of the current British monarchy. We spend several hours in the museum before we had a fine supper and then attended a very cool ceremony at the Bayeux Cathedral. They light up an ancient elm tree (planted after the Revolution in 1798) that is called the Tree of Liberty. They have a film and light show here that uses the trunk as the cinema screen. It was a great and colourful show exploring Freedom and Liberty.
We spent the National Holiday in France (July 14) exploring our new home base. Our explorations and the events we participated in took on a certain poignancy when we awoke to the news of the Nice event this morning. Today we will tackle the D-Day beaches and learn more about our Canadian military history.
