Arrival: Paris to Normandy

The tour begins at the arrivals hall at Charles de Gaulle, not in Paris proper. There is no city day: the coach picks the group up at the airport and heads west, and by evening we are in Normandy.

That is worth knowing in advance, because the name on the ticket says Paris and it is easy to assume an afternoon on the Champs-Élysées. This is the nine-day itinerary, and it spends its time where the fighting was.

The drive

Roughly three hours from the airport to the Normandy coast, most of it unremarkable motorway, and then a stretch at the end that is not.

Somewhere past Caen the landscape starts dividing itself into small fields separated by earth banks with trees growing out of the top. That is the bocage, and it is the reason the Normandy campaign took eleven weeks instead of a fortnight. Each bank is centuries old, three or four feet high, matted with roots, often with a sunken lane at its base. Every field is a walled compartment; every gap in the hedge is somewhere a machine gun has already been sighted.

From a coach window it looks pastoral. That gap — between how a place looks and what it cost — is the thing this whole tour is about, and it starts before anyone has even checked in.

The evening

There is an introduction to the tour and a chance for everyone to say who they are and why they came. On these trips that tends to take a while, and it is usually the part people remember.

Some are here for a grandfather. Some have read everything and want to stand in it. Some watched the series in 2001 and have been meaning to come ever since.

What I want to get right

Day one is the day to sort out the practical things while there is still slack in the schedule: sleep on the plane, get on local time immediately, and have the boots already broken in. From tomorrow the days start early and involve a great deal more walking than the itinerary makes obvious.