I've seen London, I've seen France...

...and that was just in the past 4 hours. But still no sign of the Queen in her damned undies.

On my way over on Wednesday, the weather was thickly overcast and rainy in Shannon. I dozed off for a bit, but woke up about an hour in and looked out the window and through a small opening in the clouds, gleaming in the sun, saw some beautiful white cliffs.

On the way back today, I spotted them again in the dusk, set around an odd-shaped peninsula with a port town on it. I wondered if they were the famous 'white cliffs of Dover' that pilots returning to England from missions over France loved to see so much, but didn't know. I flipped through Ambrose's 'D-Day' which I happened to have on my lap, and found a map illustrating the Allies Assault Paths for D-Day. It noted the port town of Dover, sitting on an odd-shaped peninsula matching exactly the coastline I was looking down at.

The north side of the peninsula led right into the Thames River, which I was able to follow through the diminishing daylight all the way into London.


Juxtaposition.

As The Grafton was my home-away-from-home in Chicago, the lounge at Shannon Airport is getting to be my home-away-from-home(-away-from-Home) here. At least they have free wireless, and since I have my laptop with me this time..... :)

I'm back now, waiting once again for the bus back to Galway, which doesn't leave for another hour still. I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.

Tons of more thoughts and photos on the trip that I'll try and get up in the next couple of days. Glad I took both my cameras as I ran through both batteries on my Canon and filled up a couple of cards (to be fair, they weren't empty to begin with and I didn't get a chance to clear them off) on my Nikon.

So much to think about and process. Here's the high-level list of what I saw today, though:

Pointe-du-Hoc, Omaha Beach (and museum), American cemetery overlooking Omaha (wow), artillery battery at Longues-sur-Mer, remains of the 'Mulberry' (artificial port) at Arromanches, the Arromanches 360 theatre show, Gold Beach, Juno Beach and the Juno Centre, Sword Beach (sort of drove past it, anyways) and Pegasus Bridge.

A quick light note on the Juno Centre. Juno was the site of the Canadian infantry divisions landing. The museum was nice. Very similar to the others, except with a distinct, quirky Canadian stamp on it. For example, it's the only museum in Normandy (I'm assuming anyways) that has a display featuring hockey and curling equipment. And not 'this-is-stuff-the-troops-brought-with-them-for-fun' stuff, but instead, modern 'this-is-what-Canada-is-all-aboot-eh!' stuff. It was also located in a room that had personal video kiosks on various topics set up in three small circle where you sit around a centre pylon that I believe were supposed to be evocative of sitting around the stovepipe in an Inuit igloo. Different, but good.

Also, the Juno Centre was apparently staffed entirely by Canadian college students, which was a nice touch. It's safe to say that Canadians and Americans both have a great deal of national pride, but it's very different in the way it is manifested in each populace.