The Beach

By : Bill Bauman
Trip Begins January 14, 2009
Trip Ends January 24, 2009

This was an anniversary trip to Paris that included a surprisingly emotional visit to Omaha Beach in Normandy.

Jan 14 - ParisThe Beach
Jan 15 - Omaha Beach
Jan 16 - Wales, UKWalking In Wales

See my photos : The Beach

[enlarge map]

[reduce map]

January 14, 2009

Top

The Beach

Paris

I grew up on beaches. When I was a kid my father took us to Ocean City and Atlantic City in the summer. Then we moved to Florida. As a teenager in the 60’s I spent a lot of my free time at Cocoa Beach, New Smyrna and Daytona beaches. I thought I knew a few things about beaches.

At the beginning of this year, I took my wife to France for our 20th anniversary. I love Scotland. She loves France. We’ve been to Scotland a lot, so I figured I owed her. That’s why I took her to France.

Paris was great. Loved it. But I really wanted to go to Normandy and see the beaches where the soldiers of America, Britain and Canada came ashore in 1944. I was surprisingly unprepared for the emotional wave that enveloped me.

My dad was an American GI, my mother was an English girl. They hooked up early in 1944 in England and managed to marry just before he was shipped out to France as part of the Allied Expeditionary Force in 1944. He was a member of that great US Army awaiting orders to invade France and begin the march to Germany. He didn’t land on D-Day. My Dad was a supply sergeant who came ashore three weeks after the infantry made their landings on the beaches of Normandy. I always knew that my dad was not infantry, and was not a war hero. He was a supply guy, who later became a prison guard, forced into that job because of all the German soldiers who surrendered in such large numbers as they sought a way out of the war. But still, he landed on the beaches of Normandy, and I had a chance to go there and see where he and the real heroes of World War II made history.

January is winter in France. Cold, misty and wet. It was just that kind of day when we went to the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial. I thought we might have a walk through the Cemetery, read some of the grave stones, tip our hats, and then go drink some nice red wine. What I wasn’t prepared for was the Memorial. It is magnificent in its simplicity. As we walked through the Memorial, I was overcome with the stories of the men who saved the world in 1944. They were so young. They mixed fear with the excitement of what they were about to do. It was powerful to read the words of General Eisenhower as he met one last time with his troops before the invasion. We spent three hours in there, and I thought we’d been gone for about 30 minutes. The films and the stories of the men who were the heroes are quite simply, stunning. They say when you die young you are forever frozen in time at that age. Certainly this is true as you learn about the lives of the men who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. It was quite an emotional experience. Then we walked out of the memorial onto the grounds of the cemetery. Nine thousand Americans are buried here. Reading the gravestones is like reading a phone book of America. What a collection of men and boys died to liberate France and the world from the darkest forces imaginable.

After we read several headstones, I wanted to walk down to the beach. It’s an easy walk down, and all the while you are walking down you are imagining what the American soldiers are thinking as they are trying to climb up under intense enemy fire. Omaha Beach is a small, but nice beach. It’s a deep sandy beach at low tide, bookended by steep hills at each end. You can imagine the French people coming here in the summer, just as I used to go to beaches for sun and fun. But your mind flashes back to those opening scenes in Saving Private Ryan, and you are walking just by the water thinking of that generation of young American soldiers trying to hit this beach and fight their way up. I picked up a small rock, washed ashore from the English Channel. Silly, but I somehow felt it connected me to those men and my Dad.

One of the great failures of American foreign policy is that cigar smokers cannot buy Cuban cigars. Well in France you can. So I bought one and I saved it for this moment. I climbed back up the beach and I sat on the edge of a monument overlooking a concrete German pillbox, which no doubt was home to a machine gun that killed a lot of Americans landing on that beach. I smoked that cigar, and I thought about what happened here. They say as men get older they become more emotional. If you doubt that, go to Omaha Beach.

January 16, 2009

Top

Walking In Wales

Wales, UK

During World War II my mother served in the Women’s Land Army of Great Britain. She and her sister were assigned to work on farms in the countryside of Wales while the Welsh farmers went off to fight the war. She used to tell me that it was dirty, hard work; but then her eyes would always twinkle a bit and she would smile and say, “...of course Wales is the most beautiful country in the world.”

One night as my wife was watching Juno from Netflix I began doing searches on Google. I started thinking about my mother’s life and without much thought googled “walking in Wales.” I was surprised by how many outfitters exist to help you plan and accomplish a walking trip in Wales. I was recently retired, four months away from turning sixty and four years on from heart surgery. I was looking for some excitement, and the more I read about Wales, the more exciting the thought of hiking through a part of the Welsh countryside became to me.

Pembrookshire Path
Since we were going to be in Scotland for part of the summer, a side trip to Wales looked to be easy. There are a lot of walking options in Wales. Generally the north is more rugged than the south. I started looking south and came upon the Pembrookshire Coastal Path, a Welsh national park. The actual trail is 143 miles long and they say if you are fit, you can do it in 12-14 days. If you are really fit, you can do it in 10-11 days. It runs along the southern coast of Wales, turning north on the western edge. Jean asked if the path had access to come and go, and when I discovered that it did, she suggested about half that length might be better. And so we found a great route from St. Davids north to St. Dogmaels. It is 61.2 miles and can easily be done in six days. By walking north we had the added benefit of having the wind to our backs, which turned out to be a very good element in our favor. I picked my outfitter and we booked it for the third week of July.

During the prior two weeks in Scotland, I checked the BBC’s weather report every night. And every night the weather and the forecast in Wales were the same. Rain, wind, and more rain. It was looking like a soggy six days were in front of us. But we were committed, had paid our outfitter in advance and there didn’t seem to be anything we could do other than to make sure we moved our rain suits from our golf bags to our rucksack.
On July 12 we flew from Glasgow to Cardiff and arrived to brilliant sunshine. Our driver was excited because he hadn’t seen the sun in three weeks. We spent Saturday night in St. Davids and toured the historical St. David’s Cathedral before turning in early. Sunday morning, as instructed, we went to the St. David’s City Hall where at 9:00am a small coastal bus called the Strumble Shuttle arrived to take us to a boathouse on the beach of St. Justinians, the starting point of our walk. There was a fine mist in the air. Not rain, but just enough mist to break out the rain suits. In two hours the rain suits were back in the pack and the day was becoming bright and sunny. That remained our weather pattern for the next six days.

The Pembrookshire path is well marked with posts showing an acorn symbol. The acorn posts often contained a second symbol, this one of a man falling off a cliff, which I believe is there to remind us walkers to pay attention. Most of the cliffs you are walking along have sheer drops of up to 400 feet to the ocean. Our outfitters prepared us well. We had an excellent guidebook written by two guys who are professional walkers and writers about walking. They had accurate notes to go with their hand drawn maps, which provided rich detail. Their hand drawn maps were the perfect compliment to the official map of the coast that we were also provided.

What’s it like?
The walk? Well, it’s a bit rugged. “Walking, climbing over huge rocks and hiking up and down massive hills” might be a better description. Some of the ascents and descents are quite steep. We walked through farmers fields, on paved roads through small villages and along the edge of cliffs. We had the constant companionship of sheep, wild goats, horses and cows. The only time I was truly scared was on the final day when we crossed over our last mountains into St. Dogmaels. If you saw the British Open this summer you may remember the 50-mile per hour wind gusts they had along the British coast on Saturday. As those winds were howling, we were walking along a path eighteen inches wide and only a couple of feet from a 400 foot drop down a slate rock cliff. The pint at the end of this walk was, without a doubt, the best one of the trip.

Along the way we met a wide variety of interesting people. These are not organized walks. You are on your own and go at your own pace. But we were constantly passing people walking the other way or passing us heading north. It seemed every time I stopped to catch my breath after a particularly steep ascent, a little guy looking 80 years old would come breezing by with a, “Morning. Nice day for a walk, isn’t it?” At one stop in the village of Newport we shared some banana bread with a twenty-year-old woman from Slovenia. She must have had 50 pounds on her back as she was camping and cooking along the trail. She told us she was averaging 15 miles a day, which we had no trouble believing as we watched her take off straight up a steep hill.

We walked about eight hours in a day and spent every night in a B&B arranged by our outfitter, who even showed up every morning to move our luggage from one B&B to the next. Some of the most interesting people we met were the folks who owned and operated these B&B’s. Several of them were young to middle age English people who had quit the rat race of London to buy and operate a B&B in Wales.

Words of Wisdom
The best advice we got before our walk was this:
1. Buy good low cut walking shoes and start breaking them in a minimum of four weeks before your walk.
2. Walk six miles a day four times a week at least a month in advance of your walk.
3. Buy a good walking stick.
But the absolute best advice I discovered was in the first page of the guidebook. “Take your time. Stop to enjoy the views. Take pictures. Don’t focus on how much further you have to go today.”

We followed that suggestion and enjoyed our walk because of it. I’ve told my friends that I am glad I did it and I’m glad it’s over. But I absolutely loved it and I can now smile back to my mother and nod my head when she says, “Wales is the most beautiful country in the world.”