Phew....finally back home yesterday. Not that keen on making another 11 hour 800 km drive any time soon to be honest
Anyhow, with most of the post-return chaos subdued, here's all the rest:
Day 11:
Le Havre, greatest port on the French Atlantic coast. The city was almost completely leveled during the war, with enourmous civilian losses, because someone on the Allied side decided a siege in the style of the 17th century would be more fun. For that reason you might notice a conspicuous absence of an
Avenue Eisenhower or a
Boulevard De Gaulle on today's city map...
The result of post-war rebuilding isn't that pretty to look at, so have a big chunk of steel instead:
You can see a few of these every day. Quite impressive...
Back home via Pont-l'Évêque, another town that was almost entirely obliterated by the war, but here the locals told the modernist architects to go where the sun don't shine and simply rebuilt their town in the traditional style. And whenever you think you're safe from WW2 for a while, you see something like this - not that I complained
Day 12:
Found a nice stretch of beach behind the dunes near Merville and simply stayed there for a while. You know, simply relaxing on a vacation can be quite fun too
....until a modeller's insticts kicked in
Later we once again ended up at the cafe at Pegasus Bridge, where I finally found the time to take a few shots of the
5cm PaK 38 auf Ringstandlafette
Day 13:
Back to the same beach as before, this time better equipped for a longer stay. Someone else took over building fortifications this time
Nothing of note happened that day, except finding out the hard way that quite a lot of places serve warm food only during noon........
Epilogue:
And that's it - 15 days, 2000+ km on the road, brought back 786 photos with 7.44 GB, two bottles of Cidre and a 2l bottle of Coke Zero, half a dozen cookie tins and a few of my friends from the
Rhinovirus family, though not very agressive ones this time. The French are just that polite.
Back home in the last light. Back to work on Monday. I need a vacation.
Philipp