Landing Beaches
Our final full day in France was spent visiting the D-Day landing beaches of Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach. These two locations were kind of the whole reason Jared wanted to go to France for spring break. He'd been here before, in 2002 or 2003 for the Transatlantic Council's Normandy Camporee and pretty much loved every minute of his time at these historic locations. Jared has wanted to go back with our family ever since and it only took almost twenty years to finally make it happen. We started out kind of late in the day, it was a vacation after all, and arrived at Pointe du Hoc just after lunchtime. Pointe du Hoc is a cliff eight miles from Omaha Beach and was the location of German artillery batteries that could have fired on American troops landing on Utah and Omaha beaches. Army Rangers scaled the 100-foot cliffs with the mission to disable the German positions and they were successful but at a great cost. Only 90 of the 225 Rangers who started the climb up the clif...