From the afternoon of our arrival on September 19(met with cookies and local apple cidre) until our departure just after dawn on September 29, our stay at Mme. Elaine Beriola's home in Ver-sur-Mer was perfect. We were two sisters and their husbands, all born during WW II, wishing to get a better picture of the battle in which our parents' generation participated, beginning on June 5-6, 1944. We were so fortunate to have found Mme. Beriola's property on the Home Away site, which portrayed a most accurate representation of her property, the location of which is on the edge of a picturesque stone constructed village (Ver-sur-Mer) bordered by the fields adjacent to her property which the Allied Forces must have traversed. Using Mme. Beriola's home as our "central headquarters," we were able to make daily trips to all of the invasion beaches, from Utah in the west to Sword and the Pegasus Bridge in the east. It afforded us a much greater appreciation for the area than we had gained from the many WW II documentaries we had viewed. On our way from Paris to Ver-sur-Mer, we were able to visit Giverny, and, later, during our stay, to travel to Dieppe, E'tretat, LeHavre, Honfleur, Deauville and Trouville. Once during our stay we traveled to Le Mont Saint Michel and spent the night in the old walled town of St.
Malo, returning to Ver-sur-Mer via the Contentin Peninsula and Cherbourg. We found the Normandy countryside so beautiful. We visited the Peace Museum in Caen and viewed the thousand-year old Bayeux Tapestry in Bayeux. We did our grocery shopping at the Carrefour in Courseilleus, the Super-U in Caen, and E. le Clerc (France's Walmart) in Bayeux, variously on the way home from our daily motor trips. We looked forward at the end of the day to staying in Ms. Beriola's immaculate yet comfortable and spacious home, where we prepared our meals in her well-equipped kitchen, consuming them at her spacious dining room table and then watching TV where we were able to stream programs in English with our Amazon Fire Stick. We were so happy to discover that Mme. Beriola provides excellent internet access! Believe it or not, we also found time to launder clothes and to line dry them with the benefit of breezes off the nearby Manche. Ms. Beriola's beds are spacious and very comfortable. We slept very well in the quiet environment surrounding her home. The early fall weather was beautiful and we so enjoyed sitting outside on her front yard patio. -30-