France

As the sun came up I finally got a good view of the "beach" man it's not a beach like any I've seen in Oceania it was a flipping quarry. Seriously rocks the size of my fist. So after saying good bye to my Aussie companions from the bus I was soon dodging the usual dog shit on the streets in France and off to find my hostel.

***

So after getting the low down it was off to Cannes with three Americans that I met in the Hostel to find some sand and try and get rid of that London tan I have developed over the last two years. Cannes is a nice we town but well out of any back packers budget. There were small boutiques everywhere selling Prada all that great back packing attire.

***

The Swede’s turned up the next day and I had an email invite to meet up as they were going to cook me dinner. Being a true kiwi I can’t pass up a free feed so I was in. After meeting the girls at there hotel we went down to the beach where they cooked up a Pasta meal on a camping stove which we ate with a few beers much to the amusement of passer byes.

***

So once again I am sitting in the reception of a hostel with no idea where I am going or where I should stay. Then the two American girls from the beach said they where off to Milan.
"Sounds good I'm in" I said and with that walk out and jumped on the next train to Italy.

The ferry journey was uneventful mainly due to the "quiet" beers my flat mates had for me the night before, so I slept the entire 7 hours it took to cross over to France.
I arrived in Caen (pronouced "carn" for all you non speakers ) at 7am and managed to find myself a lovely 1 star hotel in the middle of town for a heafty fee of 29€. For this money I got a room 2 by 2.5m a sink that wouldn´t empty, a shared bath room in the hall and a good case of bed bugs mainly due to the fact the sheets had not been washed for god knows how long.

So with my best French in tow I managed to get the right bus out to the Caen Memorial. This is the bees knees when it comes to museums on the D Day landings.

From Caen I went out and check out the artificial harbours that the allied towed over from England which was the key to the invasion. That meant that they could land anywhere along the coast. The British one is still visible 60 years later which is quite an engineering feat.

The American cemetery is on land above Omaha beach, ( the beach where the Americans lost over 3000 soldiers during the first wave of the invasion.) This cemetery is actually American soil gifted by the French it is immaculate. Over 9000 soldiers are buried here.... now that number of lives is hard to put into perspective until you can see row upon row of white crosses in this 70 hectare space.

I looked at other locations where the Gun batteries are still in place. These locations were heavily bombed on the night of the invasion. The bomb craters are still here today and they are huge, 3m deep by about 8m in diameter. The Germans were having a bad day at the office that day.

I am about to head off to Madrid so I have 19 hours of travel to look forward to ya.

I have photos to come but can´t up load them.