Trip Day 6 (Bike Day 4) – Half and half and history

Another “meh” breakfast, awful coffee (not so enamoured with the “mercure” hotel chain as our bike tour operator is) and uninspiring meteo – raining outside again.  However by the time we got out the door and picked up our “tour de france” t-shirts from the local store (a stage starts in St. Lo) it had turned to drizzle which was a definite improvement on deluge.

Nice long hill to start, out of town, guaranteed to make you feel sticky and disgusting inside the raingear.  From there it was very pleasant riding, and we got to Caranten for lunch and it had stopped.  It was a real treat to find a boulangerie and patisserie open, though the bike shop which we rode right past was closed on mardi… sigh.  We had an actual picnic, then a stop at an (open) cafe for coffee before riding on to dead man’s corner.  This region is riddled with WWII landing sites and a museum at “dead man’s corner” offered a WWII “experience” which turned out to be an interesting  re-creation of a flight over the channel on D-Day dropping paratroopers (US, so not an unbiased presentation).  From there we went to Marie St Eglise, now in sunshine,  which was milling with tourists and offered another museum on the 101 Airborne memorobilia (as well as the lovely 12th century church that housed soldiers in the fight and apparently featured in the movie “The Longest Day”) which we skipped in favour of a visit to Utah Beach Museum, a good call.  It was a rapid but lovely ride to Utah Beach with a tailwind making it ten minutes before closing (this is how Etienne lives…) but a fabulous museum and gorgeous beach, complete with a mockup of the fortifications on part of it.

A short ride then took us to our Hotel, Le grand Hard, which is a lovely “natural” hotel in the country and as such our dinner was included – a true relief not to run through the list of Trip Advisor Hotels and find the first six closed…. an excellent meal of veggies and the local cider and wine completed a rather nice day with some history and some sunshine!

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