In 1996 I was awarded FrancePress’s Prix d’Excellence for my guide to France published by Fielding Worldwide. I didn’t know about the award until my brother Jon told me. He’d learned from a patient who’d brought to his office a copy of the magazine in which the prize was announced.

Though few others noticed the award, it has nevertheless allowed me ever since to call myself—and better yet to have others call me—an award-winning travel writer.

But 1996 was a long time ago and that Fielding book had a short shelf life, so for a while there being referred to as an award-winning writer felt like I was trying to get mileage from winning honorary mention in a 9th-grade essay contest.

Imagine then my pride and relief when last year I received a second award for travel writing, making me not only a double award-winning writer but a recent award-winning writer.

I am therefore proud, relieved, and honored to show you my new award for travel writing: the New Jersey Native Garden Award.

My first award referred to my work as “informative and entertaining,” which may seem to have more gravity than the “charming and delightful” of this second award. Nevertheless these new adjectives are a welcome addition to my resume.

This latest award refers to the Arbor Day piece that I posted on this page one year ago. You can read it by clicking here.

In reading it you will discover all the hope and pleasure that went into my planting a sprig of silky dogwood last April. The certificate announcing the award was accompanied by a letter from Ginger Young, president of the West Trenton Garden Club, in which she wrote, “I hope the Silky Dogwood is doing well… Mine is about 4’ high now.”

Well, it turns out my sprig was gone before the award arrived.

I’m pretty sure the guy on the lawnmower seen over my shoulder in the photo below was to blame. He claimed he never saw it, which sounds like evidence to me.

That picture was taken yesterday, Arbor Day 2010. Like last year at this time I was in West Trenton, New Jersey visiting family and it was a beautiful spring day. This year I wanted to honor the day while also doing something to halt erosion of the lake on my brother’s property. So, having planted 10 junipers along water’s edge earlier in the week, I planted 10 more yesterday.

While shoveling holes I may or may not have cut the wire to that lamp post beside me in the picture. I can’t tell because no one seems to know where the switch is anymore.

I don’t expect to receive an award for this year’s Arbor Day piece, however I do expect the junipers, at least some of them, to last longer than the silky dogwood. And what does a juniper need with recognition as long as it has a place to grow.

Links:
Arbor Day
West Trenton Garden Club
The Garden Club of New Jersey
The National Garden Clubs, Inc. Nuture the Earth, Plant Natives, Plant Organically Project

The March equinox, aka the vernal or spring equinox in the Northern Hemisphere, occurred today. That’s the moment when the sun is directly in line with the equator; day and night are of about equal length.

For Earthlings, the March equinox means that spring has begin in the Northern Hemisphere and that autumn has begun in the Southern Hemisphere. For Christians following Western traditions and the Gregorian calendar, the March equinox is also related to Easter since Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the full moon occurring on or after the March equinox.

That’s why some churches, such as Saint Sulpice in Paris, have central, internal sundials of sorts designed to indicate the day of the equinox.

I was touring Saint Sulpice with a group of journalists today when at precisely 1 p.m. (i.e. noon Greenwich Mean Time), we gathered around the altar railing to watch the a spot of sun, coming from a hole in the window of the southern transept (above left in this photo), reach a marker in front of the altar.

(Saint Sulpice, you may recall, is the church that was fictionalized by Dan Brown in the “Da Vinci Code.”)

Saint Sulpice has transparent windows since narrative stained glass was passé when the church was built in the 17th century. The angle of that photo makes it appear that it was a bright out today, but it was in fact mostly cloudy in the early afternoon, though with occasional bursts of sunlight. We could nevertheless make out the oval spot of sun moving across the marker.

The photo below was taken about two minutes after the magic moment. You can make out the spot of sun now just above the marker. The line to either side of the marker is a meridian line.

If our group hadn’t been there (and we didn’t know about the event until we arrived for the tour) I don’t know if anyone would have witnessed the passage of the equinox at this spot this year. An odd thought, but upon leaving the church I could see that there are far more popular things to do in the Saint Sulpice quarter early on a Saturday afternoon. One of them is to queue to go into the Pierre Hermé chocolate and pastry shop across the intersection.

If I were a traveler who’d been to Paris say two or three times before and it were a sunny day, any season, and I felt like taking a walk in a neighborhood where I’d never been, just an old-fashion neighborhood circumscribed by boulevards and avenues and train tracks, a neighborhood without much traffic or hubbub, where I could spend a few hours following my nose…

and allowing myself to be surprised by details without feeling that I had to learn or appreciate or buy anything in particular,…

a real neighborhood, with a locksmith-shoemaker…

and a restorer of old plumbing…

and shops that don’t scream “deposit your tourist money here!,”…

the kind of neighborhood where I’d go without lunch plans and instead check menus and decor as I walked around before settling on, say, a good Indian restaurant (Maharaja), or a bistro/wine bar (Oh Bigre), or something contemporary (La Family),…

or perhaps be tempted by the food shops to create a picnic…

and head past the little church (Sainte Marie des Batignolles) that I’d feel no tourist obligation to visit…

to the neighborhood park, where I might stroll the paths of the city’s most charming English-style garden…

then sit on a bench enjoying my picnic while observing various species of ducks and geese at play or at sleep and contemplating an ominous, pigeon-dropped statue of turkey vultures (or eagles?)…

before leaving the park to sit in a café, where I’d think, “Now this looks like a nice quarter to live in, how come I’ve never read about it?,”…

then I’d probably take the metro to Rome or Place de Clichy…

and visit the Batignolles quarter in the 17th arrondissement.

The Weatherman, March 3

I rarely go out for lunch in winter,
but today I joined a television weatherman
at a neighborhood restaurant that prides itself
in serving only the freshest of fresh food,
though it seemed a stretch for the waiter to call the scorpion fish fruity.

He recognized him, and I think the women at the next table did, too.
And afterwards someone stopped to say hello as we crossed the bridge.
What a beautiful day to be walking by the canal, she said.
It’s going to get cold again, he warned, maybe even snow next week.

I don’t have a TV to see him wave his hands before the map of France.
But I saw buds on the bush on my balcony today,
and the cat, too, noticed the morning sun on the kitchen table
finally reaching over the grey mansard across the street,
where the neighbors close their curtains a little later every day.

I went to La Poste, the post office, yesterday to use their copying machine. It’s the closest business with a copying machine from my apartment. About half of the time the machine is out of order, but yesterday it was working.

I couldn’t find it at first. In the eleven years that I’ve lived in the neighborhood this is fourth time, I believe, that the public area has been renovated and reconfigured. Each time, the post office employees there have gotten a bit friendly, a bit more human. At least briefly. I suppose that happens in every workplace as new, more comfortable surroundings give employees an added sense of well-being.

Yesterday, though, I thought that something deeper had been going on at my post office over the years, that little by little the employees had come to see themselves (or been forced to see themselves) as offering a service to their clients and not simply as a cog in the machine of public service. Much, not all, of that has to do with the fact that that public service machine is about to become private. On March 1, La Poste will go from being a public company to being joint-stock company, albeit largely controlled by the State. The old dull, cranky, reliable postal worker is already gone, I thought as I entered the post office, since in recent times the employees have increasingly appeared to want to satisfy clients’ postal, packaging, or banking needs. Or in my case, the client’s photocopying needs.

Now when you enter this post office there is someone at a lectern-like desk who, if you require help, will direct you to the appropriate station. I didn’t walk up to him but rather into the center of the post office and looked around. He came up to me to ask what I was looking for, something that had never before happened to me in this post office. I told him that I was looking for la photocopieuse.

He then actually walked me over to the machine. When I saw that it required exact change, at 10 cents per copy, I asked where I could get change for a euro. His response: “You should try to come with exact change because we’d run out if we made change for everyone, but I think I have enough now, I’ll get it for you.” And so he did.

I left with my copies made and a sense that my post office was now a warmer place and that on the planet of customer service I had just witnessed a small step for man, a giant leap for France.

* * *

Today I went to the same post office to mail a personal letter to the U.S.. I wanted an attractive stamp rather than a sticker from the scale machine so I went up to the Mailing-Letter-Packages desk. It was either a slow mail day or the new reconfiguration of the post office is actually effective because there was only one person ahead of me and he was soon gone.

I handed my letter to the postal worker and said I needed stamps for the U.S.. She said, “I’ll show you were you can do that at the machine.” That seemed odd since I was at the stamp desk, but I suppose that she’d been told by her superior to show people how to do it at the scale machine, the postal version of “give a man a fish and he’ll have food for a day; show a man how to fish and he’ll never go hungry”: sell a man a stamp and he’ll send a letter; teach a man to make stamps and he’ll communicate with the world.

I told her that I didn’t want machine stamps I want attractive stamps, des beaux timbres.

At his she snickered, loudly, a veritable, uncontrollable laugh, into my face. She wasn’t laughing because I might have said something funny; in fact, her laugh had nothing to do with stamps themselves but rather in an attempt to put me down because I had preferred my solution to hers. I wasn’t following her script. In her script the customer tells her that he wants to send a letter and she comes to the rescue and teaches him how to use the machine so that he’ll “never go hungry.” Instead, here I was asking for my script to trump hers.

You wouldn’t think wanting an attractive stamp instead of a basic machine stamp would be so offensive to an employee of the post office who can actually sell you stamps, but it is when that employee feels that you’re asking too much. It’s the same in the grocery store, in a café or even in the lobby in your apartment building: ask for something or initiate a conversation that is not in the other’s script—that goes beyond the boundaries he has set for himself—and that person will panic.

Customer service employees are so easily destabilized by other people’s scripts that they become downright aggressive by line two. A wall is thrown up to say “You aren’t playing by my rules of what this situation is all about, so don’t expect me to cooperate easily.”

Strange as it may seem, I had in some way insulted this postal employee’s sense of efficiency. She therefore immediately reverted to the stand-by French customer service attitude whereby the affronted employee mocks the client or tries to put him down in order to brandish her power, however insignificant that power may seem on the outside.

In a sense, the fellow who provided me with change for the photocopieuse yesterday had done the same thing by insisting that he was making an exception by providing me with change and that next time I should come prepared. That may sound like a perfectly reasonable thing for him to say, and indeed he did so with courtesy, but he said it, I believe, because, too, had felt a need to assert his power, to let me know that in the future his script will trump mine.

It may sound ridiculous that a person selling stamps would laugh at me for wanting to buy stamps, but that only goes to show how ingrained the old customer service mentality is despite a fourth restructuring of the post office in eleven years. Here, the rules are the rules, and those rules are very limited and circumscribed. Caveat emptor.

My letter was heavy enough to required 1€70 in stamps, double the base rate of 85 cents for a letter overseas. Or as the postal employee put it, “1€70, because you’re over 20 grams. You can check that at the machine.”

Perhaps I’ve been overanalyzing all this. Perhaps she just had a bug up her ass.

It’s been unusually cold in Paris, mostly a dry cold though. It’s the damp cold that normally marks the Paris winter so, warmly dressed, it’s nearly a pleasure to be in the cold outside. It’s inside that things get dicey. I returned to Paris a few days ago after six weeks in the U.S. and have since spent a good amount of time winterizing the apartment: hanging curtains, plugging spaces on the edges of doors and windows, buying an electric heater.

The elderly woman downstairs used to heat a lot in winter, I could tell by the warmth of my parquet, but she now goes south for much of the winter. And a guy in his 20s recently moved next door and doesn’t need to turn on his own heat very often since most nights he warms his apartment by having a dozen friends over for a rave party. I’m left to heating my own space. So much for community.

The best place to find community these days is in the cafes and bars of the residential neighborhoods. They’ve been quite crowded, I’ve noticed, these past few days and evenings, smokers swarming by the doorways. Crisis, what crisis?

I love cafes in winter, the way people come in rubbing the cold off their hands. There’s more of a community feel to a café in winter than in summer. In summer everyone wants a piece personal joy, their own proverbial spot in the sun. You tolerate your neighbors at surrounding tables in summer, but other than the usual sexual attraction you’d rather have nothing to do with them. In winter, though, there’s more of a feel that we’re all in this together. On especially cold winter days, as in rain storms in other seasons, the café becomes a kind of genteel bomb shelter. It’ll pass, we think, or we’ll soon go out and confront the elements, but in the meantime un autre, s’il vous plaît.

I just got home from having coffee with a friend and I take back what I said a paragraph ago.

There isn’t much of a sense of community in the café after all. I now think that the difference between the winter café and the summer café is that in winter Parisians have even less of a sense of personal space than they do in summer. Their sweaters, scarves, and coats not only put a damper on the aforementioned sexual attraction but also make people unaware of where their space ends and others’ begin. Add to that the shopping bags now that the annual winter sales period is underway and oh the looks you get when you ask a woman to take her ankle-length duvet coat and H&M bags from an otherwise available chair so that you can sit down! Sometimes the bomb shelter feels less genteel, but once you and your friend have got your space it’s café society as holders of McStarbucks Cards can only dream about, even at McStarbucks in Paris.

Yesterday, after insulating window cracks in the morning, I went out to take photos in my neighborhood along the canal. There were at least a dozen people taking pictures within the same 300-yard stretch of the canal during the same 30-minute grey-day photo shoot, including a couple of guys with long lenses, one with a tripod. The thought that most of those photographers were going to put their pictures on blogs accompanied or not by text about the cold in Paris and the ice on the canal was rather disheartening. It’s one thing to compete for elbow room in a café, it’s quite another to think that we’re all competing for attention on the internet.

Truth be told, the canal is not a highly photogenic place. Oh, it’s a nice place to live, to hang out, to stroll, to café-sit, and, when the weather’s right, to picnic, but its color combination of dark green, grey, beige, brown, and black, with little sky in the frame and an uninspiring mishmash of architecture alongside, make the canal an awkward place to photograph. We all pointed our cameras towards the ice in the hopes that that would be evocative enough.

I stood on a bridge by a guy with a long lens to take the shot above of gull prints in the dusting of snow on the ice. The guy tried not show that he was annoyed by my “copying” him, but when I then followed him over to shoot a view from the side he gave me the same look as the women whose space I invaded in the café today. Why should his blog have better photos than mine just because he’s got a bigger lens?

The canal may not be very photogenic but the Eiffel Tower always is. That explains why one occasionally comes across some stunning photographs of the Eiffel Tower. Problem is, it’s hard to make the Eiffel Tower look like anything but the Eiffel Tower, by which I mean that it rarely evokes any other thought than: That’s the Eiffel Tower, I’ve been there (or I want to be there).

That’s why I love the joy that comes across in Va-nu-pieds’ Eiffel Tower photo that you can see by clicking here. In it he managed to capture the sense of ecstasy at coming upon a distant view of the Iron Lady. I’m honored that he gave me first dibs to use it on France Revisited’s Photography Blog.

A close look at the shot shows that he must have taken the picture in summer because you can see the sandal tan lines on his foot (unless those are shadows from the beams), but the Eiffel Tower is timeless enough that, unlike in my apartment, a difference of 50 degrees Fahrenheit doesn’t matter.

One more winter photographic note: Not being much of a photographer myself, I do occasionally get lucky, as in this winter homage to Claude Monet that I shot a year ago.

You remember Jordan Zell, don’t you, the France Revisited Guest Blogger from Israel who came to Paris in June seeking inspiration for his songwriting?

Well, this fall, freshly inspired and with new songs in his repertoire, Jordan has taken the next step in his career and has been playing in bars in Jerusalem. He’s been performing his own songs and various covers accompanied by talented guitarist and assistant arranger Yuri Stolov.

One of the songs they’ve been playing is “On a Train from Paris to Rome,” which Jordan was working on in Paris and for which I wrote the lyrics. One of these days we’ll get around to making a real video for it, but in the meantime you can watch and listen to a recent practice performance of the song at the Putin Bar in Jerusalem.

I’m actually not a big fan of this version since I find its ending is a bit of a downer (Jordan disagrees), Yuri’s fingering sometimes makes it sound as though the train is headed to Spain (Yuri disagrees), and the sound quality, though decent for bar, isn’t great, especially regarding the lyrics, which I’m sure you’ll all want to listen to very attentively. Also, you can’t see Jordan’s face from behind his shadow-mask. But I’m just the lyricist.

So here it is, Jordan Zell and Yuri Stolov playing “On a Train from Paris to Rome,” a travel song by Jordan Zell (music) and yours truly (lyrics), take 1.

One day you’re walking down your street on your way home, taking in a view that you’ve seen a thousand, no, ten thousand times, when a disturbing thing happens: there among the ever-so-familiar surroundings of sidewalks and buildings, streetlamps and awnings, shade, trunks, and leaves, something seems off.

It’s just a small detail, say a spiny husk fallen from the tree, but when you bend down for a closer look you realize that you never knew the tree in your street bore such fruit.

You pick it up—or rather I did—and discover that for the past ten years you—or rather I—haven’t been living on a street bordered by linden trees but by something else. Linden trees don’t bear fruit like this, and certainly not in late summer, and certainly not with a spiny husk that contains what turns out to be some kind of nut.

Ten years! How could I not have noticed? I thought something was strange when I stood on my balcony one late afternoon and watched the Asian family who occasionally, at about 5:30, just before the garbage truck arrives, go through the garbage cans along the sidewalk. They weren’t going through the garbage though but rather were gathering something beneath the trees. I had quickly forgotten (I took this photo a few days later), however something must have stuck. Later the same day, returning from the bakery, I noticed husks on the ground. There were lots of them, beneath all the trees.

How could I have missed them? And for ten years!

One moment you’re walking beneath your lindens—yes, your lindens—on your way to buy bread, and five minutes later, demi baguette in hand, you discover that you live on a street not with lindens but with some kind of nut-bearing trees.

Your life then feels like a fraud. Mine did, at least the part that is supposedly aware of its surroundings, the part that feels at home on a street with linden trees. But those aren’t lindens after all. The leaves, I saw upon looking up, though heart-shaped like a linden’s, were serrated, like a scary version of linden leaves. And those spiny husks (photo left) look like something from a horror movie! How could I never have noticed them before?

Earlier in the summer I was doing some research on the internet—that free-floating kind of research that I associated with the World Book encyclopedia when I was a kid, during which you forget what you were looking for but find along the way lots of details wish you could hold onto—and came across a man I have come to know as Monsieur Nature.

Mr. Nature knows all about the birds and the bees and the crops and the trees. I wrote to him and eventually enlisted him to lead me on some naturalist wanderings on the edge of the Paris region, particularly in a zone known as the Vexin Français. The Vexin Français is a regional natural park of villages and farmland north of the Seine on the edge of the Paris region, just before entering Normandy.

I’ll write more about the Vexin Français in a later blog. But I mention Mr. Nature now because in my disturbed state at discovering nuts on my lindens I sent him the following photo and asked him to identify the tree.

“Salut Gary!,” he responded. “You’re to be excused as an urbanite! Other than the flowering of the catkins that comes at a different season from that of lindens (and that should have set you on a different path héhé…)…”

I’ve translated the above line since his message was in French. For catkins he’d written chatons, which I had to look up in my French-English dictionary. After that I had to look up catkins in my Webster’s. It means “a spicate inflorescence,” which was no help at all.

Mr. Nature went on to tell me that my linden was in fact a noisetier de Byzance, corylus colurna, known in English as a Turkish filbert. He tried to reassure me that my ignorance was excusable by telling me that the leaves of the noisetier de Byzance resemble the linden’s and that both trees often have a pyramidal shape. He added that the Turkish filbert tolerates drought and chalky, alkaline soils, as well as pollution and wind, which made them good city plans. And he informed me that the nuts are edible, which explains the family harvesting them the other day. They are, in fact, hazelnuts.

Mr. Nature sent me to the following website: www.lesarbres.fr/fiche-byzance.php
Here’s one in English: plantfacts.osu.edu/descriptions/0246-332.html

Various websites, I’ve since found, note how the Turkish filbert “resembles a linden from a distance.” (Compare the linden to the right with the filbert at the top of this blog.) But I’ve been walking walk by the trees on my street every day, 2, 4, 6 times a day! And for ten years now!

Not knowing doesn’t bother me so much as not noticing. I had never noticed how serrated the leaves are. I had never even registered that spiky husks fall in late August or early September, let alone that there are hazelnuts inside.

From my window I thought for ten years that I’ve been watching linden leaves bud in April, that I’ve been watching linden leaves’ pale green turn a deep green, that I’ve been watching linden leaves blown by the wind, that I’ve been watching linden leaves turn yellow then brown and then fall. But I haven’t been watching that all, I’ve been watching filbert leaves!

Several times now I’ve gone out to the Vexin Français and other greenery with Mr. Nature and have been trying to remember the names of trees, particularly that in French birch is bouleau and beech is hêtre. But it won’t stick. It isn’t a vocabulary problem it’s a natural problem. Botanical names just don’t stay with me.

I’ve repeated those names a dozen times—birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… birch=bouleau, beech= hêtre… etc. I’ve stared at a single birch for a full three minutes thinking of nothing but bouleau. But still, show me a birch and I’m likely not even to remember that it is a birch, let alone un bouleau.

I know where the ambulatory/déambulatoire is in Notre-Dame, I remember that Henri IV was assassinated in 1610, and I’m pretty good at distinguishing a Pissarro from a Sisley, things that interest me only when I’m in a particularly cultured mood but that truly don’t matter to me.

But I am very attached to trees. In an uninformed way I’m drawn to them. I’m fascinated by the ways in which they, too, live and change and suffer and survive and adapt and blossom and stay serene. That must be why trees frequently appear on this blog. And I recognize that one of the wonderful things about Paris compared with, say, New York or Rome, is that wherever you go you’ll see a variety of trees: plane trees and horse chestnuts and lindens and, I now know, Turkish filberts—hazelnuts, if you like.

But I’m unlikely to remember their names. They just won’t stick in my non-botanical brain. Still, some kind of awareness remains, some kind of discovery, for having digested the disturbing fact that I no longer live on a street with lindens, I feel, as summer ends, a sense of renewal, as though I’ve moved to a new neighborhood, a new street, where hazelnuts grow, and where filbert leaves will soon be falling.

Sometimes, when the weather’s nice and I feel nature calling, I’ll take the RER out of the city, not too far, a half-hour ride from the center of Paris. Actually, it isn’t nature calling but a friend of mine who lives out there. He’ll pick me up at the station and drive us back to his house, about 15 minutes away.

He has a beautiful backyard, full of all kinds of trees and plants and a vegetable garden and a chicken-n-pigeon coop where he raises birds such as chickens, pheasants, and Texan and Hubbell pigeons.

I like visiting his backyard because I don’t have one of my own.

I see lindens from my window but no ginkgoes or beeches or pines, as he does.  

I see pigeons, but none like this, none I would want to touch.

Then we’ll have lunch, if possible containing something from the garden, like the zucchini that’s plentiful right now. Oh and those cherries earlier in the month!

And pigeon.

No, just kidding, we didn’t eat one of those beautiful pigeons on Sunday. We had rabbit.

U.S. President Obama, French President Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Brown, and Canadian Prime Minister Harper visited the Landing Zone in Normandy on Saturday but I beat them to the punch, spending a few days there earlier in the week before the crowds arrived. The photo log below shows many (but not all) of the main D-Day sights and cemeteries that one can see over about three days if setting out from Paris.

In an article to appear next week on France Revisited I’ll be outlining a series of possible itineraries, but for now I invite you to join me on a portion of my own itinerary last week.

I lucked upon a string of sunny days, hence the blue skies in the photos, which is a rarity in Normandy, as anyone who has read about the events of June 1944 knows. Though my own trip also included a visit to Deauville and Honfleur before visiting the Landing Zone and Le Mont Saint Michel, Saint Malo, Le Mans, and Chartres afterwards, this photo log focuses on sights along and inland of the Landing Zone of June 6, 1944.

However, I can’t help but begin with images of Monet’s Garden and House at Giverny since it’s only a slight detour on the way to Normandy. In a sense, the day was too blue when I took the picture below left of Monet’s water lily pond since there was nothing in the sky to be reflected in the water as there often was in Monet’s work. The garden, below right, was in full bloom.

The road to Normandy from Paris more or less follows the Seine downstream towards the English Channel. After Giverny I backtracked upstream along the river to visit La Roche Guyon. I planned it that way because if visiting both it’s advisable to arrive early at Giverny. Furthermore, La Roche Guyon makes for a better lunch stop between the two.

La Roche Guyon naturally rings far fewer bells than Giverny, but it’s an interesting stop for a WWII tour because the chateau in the photo below left is where German Field Marshall Rommel set up his headquarters when he was appointed by Hitler to oversee and reinforce defenses along the Atlantic Wall. Many of the Landing sights that you’ll see in Normandy were personally inspected by Rommel from January to May 1944. The chateau of La Roche Guyon has a 1000-year history that I won’t go into here. The main marks from Rommel’s period are the casements where ammunition was kept, which now present an exhibit about that period. Otherwise, the chateau is a wonderful mishmash of periods with a beautiful view over the Seine. I typically think of Giverny as a pain for a daytrip on its own from Paris, but I do like the idea of a day combining Giverny with La Roche Guyon, though it’s necessary to have a car to do so or good biking legs from Vernon. La Roche Guyon is a pretty Seine-side town. The photo below right is a view upstream from the town.

Approaching the D-Day sights from the east, i.e. with the British and Canadian Landing Beaches, the first stop is Pegasus Bridge, which was rapidly taken by British airborne troops arriving in three gliders on the night of June 5-6, 1944. The bridge was taken in order to cut off German troops—and especially tanks—that might arrive from further east once the landing started and to prevent them from crossing the Orne River. The bridge that now goes over the Orne (below left) is a higher tech replica of the original bridge, which has been moved onto the grounds of the Pegasus Memorial Museum a few hundred yards away, which tells about the British airborne landing.

The Merville Battery was also captured by British airborne troops arriving by parachute and glider on the night of June 5-6, 1944. This was a major German battery between the coast and the right bank of the Orne whose guns were capable of firing on Sword Beach, the easternmost of the Landing Beaches. I won’t tell here the heroic and bloody story of how it was taken, but I will say that after reading about it and visiting the site several times before I was fortunate to hear first-hand last week when I met Alexander Taylor, who landed on a glider that night.

The Landing Zone is worth a visit at any time of year, but those who visit in the days surrounding June 6 may well encounter visiting some of the men who took part in the landing. During the 20 or times that I’ve visited the Landing Zone, beginning in 1992, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with visiting veterans on various occasions, but this is the first time I actually stood at the very spot where a man landed on D-Day and had him describe the event to me as he lived them. When I asked him his name also told me his dog tag number, 22543202. Here is Alexander Taylor, 22543202 standing tall at the Merville Battery, which he helped capture and render unusable at the age of 20.

I am sorry to say that I gave the Canadians short shift on this visit. Though I did stop at Juno Beach (where pit bulls and rottweilers are not allowed, I note in case you were planning on traveling with one), I didn’t visit the June Beach Center, Canada’s Second World War museum, which is by the beach at Courseulles-sur-Mer. Nor did I visit the Canadian Cemetery, which is a few miles inland at Riviers. Apologies to my Canadian readers. If anyone has a photo of the Canadian Cemetery I would like to post it here.

Arromanches is the town at the center of Gold Beach. It was here that the British built the artificial harbor known as a Mulberry. Some remnants of the harbor still remain just offshore. (The photo below, with clouds, was one that I took last year on June 6.) The D-Day Museum at Arromanches shows how the harbor was built and how it operated, along with other displays about the landing and the various nationalities that took part.

The only German battery along this coast with its canons still visible are those at Longues-sur-Mer. The photo below is one of four 155mm gun emplacements at Longues that were a danger to the landing of British troops at Gold Beach as they could fire up to 12 miles. Visiting the complex you’ll also see the position of its command center by the cliff and other concrete elements of the Atlantic Wall. Three of the four canons were put out of commission by naval fire within the first hour of the landing, but one was occasionally operational until about 5 p.m. The garrison here of 184 Germans surrendered to the British the following day.

Americans tend to visit only the American Cemetery but I think it’s important to visit those of other nationalities so as to have a sense not only of their loss and sacrifice but of their approach to their war dead. Here’s a section of the British Cemetery at Bayeux.

The American connection with Normandy begins with D-Day, but the British connection goes back much further, beginning with William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, who took the crown of England after the Battle of Hastings in 1066. William is buried at the Abbaye aux Hommes (Men’s Abbey) at Caen.

The tapestry was made in about 1080 to be hung during Christmastime in the Cathedral of Bayeux. Inside the cathedral a plaque honors British troops who fought in the WWI.

In visiting the American sector, i.e. Utah and Omaha Beaches and related sights, I generally recommend starting out to Utah Beach, the westernmost beach, then visiting your way back towards Omaha rather than the other way around. On the way to Utah you might first stop, as I did, at the German Cemetery by the village of La Cambe. This cemetery contains the largest number of dead of all of the cemeteries in the region, over 21,000, including 207 unknown soldiers buried beneath the mound that dominates the cemetery.

I neglected to take any pictures at Utah Beach but here are pictures of the nearby village of Sainte-Mère-du-Mont, right, where men and women were playing soldier and parading around with their wartime jeeps. You’ll come across these collectors (I suppose that’s the word for them) at any time of year but especially around the anniversary of D-Day. Hundreds were gathering for the 65th anniversary this weekend. Few of them are American or British. I mostly heard French and Dutch last week.

I was in a little bar in Port-en-Bessin one evening when a jeep sporting a U.S. flag parked right out front. Out popped a big man with a long gray beard and a short plump women, both dressed in U.S. army uniforms, looking like Mr. and Mrs. Claus on a Bob Hope special. They entered the bar and the man demanded beer. That’s all he said, “Beer,” and he held one hand about 18 inches above the other to show that he wanted it big. The bartender asked where he was from. He said, “Czechoslovakia,” and he meant it.

The photo bottom right is of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the town taken by American airborne troops on the night of June 5-6 and securing the bridges and roads of the western edge of the Landing area. The parachute hanging from the steeple is a wink to paratrooper John Steele who got stuck there. The Airborne Museum at Sainte-Mère-Eglise is quite good and has an excellent introductory film to both the overall landing operation and the specific events in and around Sainte-Mère-Eglise. 

The guns at Pointe du Hoc were a danger for the landing at the two American beaches, Utah and Omaha, and even though the Rangers who climbed the cliff discovered to their surprise that the guns had been moved inland and weren’t operational, the site is nevertheless one of the most dramatic of those in the Landing Zone. In addition to the drama of the events of June 6-8, 1944 that took place here as the Rangers took and held the battery, the site also reveals the construction and workings of the German battery complex and the extent to which it was bombed. The bomb craters here, unlike most craters elsewhere along the coast, have not been filled in. The top photo below shows the Pointe du Hoc and the cliff that the Rangers scaled. The bottom photo shows some of the bombed out landscape.

The American Cemetery is about 15 minutes east along the coast from Pointe du Hoc. The cemetery overlooks Omaha Beach, the bloodiest of the five Landing Beaches. I’ll be writing about Omaha Beach, the cemetery, and all else that’s mentioned above in a separate article. For now I just point out the three images below: a view of the cemetery (top left), the memorial to American youth rising from the waves (right), and Omaha Beach (bottom left).

As noted above regarding Alexander Taylor, 22543202, encountering men and women somehow related to the events of the war—whether veterans, their children, Normans who lived through it or their children—is enormously enriching in exploring this zone. Below is a photo of Bernard Lebrec, whose apple farm produces the three main alcoholic beverages produced in the department of Calvados: cidre, pommeau, brandy. His farm, originally purchased prior to the war by his grandfather, is located in Englesqueville la Percèe, a village between Pointe du Hoc and the American Cemetery. You might stop in for a tasting, and if you do so be sure to inquire into the wartime history of the farm. As with many of the large farmhouses along the coast, that of Mr. Lebrec’s grandfather’s was requisitioned by the Germans during the war. Then, after the landing, it was occupied by the Americans. The American 147th Engineer Combat Battalion made it their headquarters and built an airstrip in the family’s apple orchard in the early days of the Invasion of Normandy. I photographed Mr. Lebrec below standing in front of the monument erected on his property in honor of the 147th.

So ends my photo log from the Landing Zone. More detailed articles will follow on France Revisited’s France/Northwest section this month.