History lessons in Bayeux, Normandy

"A wealth of history can enrich us"  

This trip was an entire history lesson wrapped up in a holiday. A visit to the Normandy D-day Beaches was long overdue, and as much as we did not see even a fraction of the numerous historial sites that commemorate the Second World War around this area - we saw enough to come out of it more knowledgable than we had been.
If you do go, be prepared to visit  a very small town. You can probably walk the length and breadth of Bayeux in two hours. Its entire tourism is managed around the famous Bayeux Tapestry and its War Museums. Bayeux was the first city to be liberated during the Normandy D-Day landings of 1944. It was also the only city that was not destroyed during the German bombings.

Make a point to visit the Memorial Museum of the 1944 Battle of Normandy. It is extensively packed with information and artefacts:  from the nurses uniforms worn at the time, to the weapons and armoured vehicles that were used. My daughter took in every bit of it, they have been studying this period of European history at school and this visit could not have been timed better. My son, though not as enthralled as his sister, was still able to finish the entire tour without much complaint. We probably could have spent more time than the estimated 45 minutes time but I was managing two age groups so had to rush though it a bit. There is all you need to know about the planning that was behind the operations that were to liberate France from the Germans.

We walked to the Bayeux War Cemetry - its thousands of headstones in the vast field, brings home the reality of the numbers that perished during this war. And this is not even a large cemetry by measure against all the others in Normandy. Approximately 4500 Commonwealth soldiers of the Allied Forces were buried here.

Before this trip, when we  mentioned  to friends that we were headed to Bayeux, the first thing they recommended was for us to see the Tapestry.
So we saved the Musée de la Tapisserie de Bayeux for our second day, thinking this would take us a while. The Bayeux Tapestry is a very famous piece of embroidery that was created to depict the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and the Norman conquest of England.

If you do go, make sure to pay for that audio guide, as it is well worth the cost. The Tapestry is  70m long with about fifty scenes depicting in great detail the embroidered events of the history. The audio guide is timed to guide you through every scene as you walk around the tapestry. We were there on a fairly quiet morning so it went fairly well - I can imagine it can get quite chaotic if there are crowds.
The tour lasted around 45 minutes and it too, was a highly educational excursion. I learnt more about about Anglo-Franco relations in the middle ages than I'd known before. the Tapestry has been claimed by both the French and the English, and its origins and history still remain controversial.

 The streets are narrow and used mainly by pedestrians, so your driving around may prove to be more of an annoyance than useful.

A visit to  Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery and Memorial concluded the trip. The memorial is a high tech museum, with video screenings around museum, and wall posters packed with loads of information - which makes for easy reading for children and adults alike.