Northwest France | France Revisited

Clockwise from top left: German gun at Longues-sur-Mer; jeeps at anniversary commemoration at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont; Omaha Beach seen from the American Cemetery; British and German cemetery in the fields at Secqueville-en-Bessin. Photos GLK.

Advice and Itineraries for Visiting the D-Day Landing Zone of Normandy

By Gary Lee Kraut

The most rewarding travels in the D-Day Landing Zone and surrounding area of Normandy come when you’ve found an insightful and personal combination of visits to sights, cemeteries, and museums, of views and tastes of contemporary life in the area, and of human encounters along the way. You can try to concentrate those into a single day or take the slow-travel approach over four or five days.


Calvados, Where Rotting Apples Have a Good Name Travelers naturally associate France with vineyards and wine but Normandy, one of the rare French regions whose climate has inspired no vineyards, offers not the fruit of the vine but that of the apple tree. Apples, and to a lesser extent pears, thrive in this region, providing the hungry traveler with apple-laced sauces and the thirsty traveler with cidre (hard cider), Calvados (apple brandy), and pommeau, (a combination of the two). Read More
Must-Tastes of the Normandy Landing Zone: 4 Norman Cheeses Though your primary interest in visiting Lower Normandy may be the Landing Beaches and various sights of the Invasion of Normandy 1944, it’s the greenery of inland Normandy that first grabs your attention when arriving from Paris—that and the hedgerows, the apple orchards, the traditional half-timbered homes and barns, the horses, and, most importantly, the cows. Read More
Travel Beyond the Clichés While Looking Back In Angers It was a slow news day in Angers, and probably too in the surrounding swath of the Loire Valley, when I arrived to speak at the city’s English-language library. I could tell because the regional newspaper found space to announce the event. Read More
Stay Tuned for Explorations in Northwest France This section, to develop over the coming months, will cover explorations of the regions that comprise Northwest France: Normandy: The D-Day Landing Beaches and other WWII sites of the Battle of Normandy; the 11^th-century Bayeux Tapestry which in 2007 was joined UNESCO’s Memory of the World International Register; Calvados brandy; Norman cows; Camembert de Normandie and other unpasteurized-milk cheeses that are illegal back home; the rustic beauty of Pays d’Auge; the luxury of the resort town of Deauville, the charms of Honfleur; the Read More