A busy month of April

After the weekend in Ouistreham, I came back home with two passengers who found themselves stranded by the train strike. Well, almost. They found out it was going to be a strike day beforehand and we organized the return in advance. They were dear friends of Carrie's. It made the drive back to Paris much more interesting and I now have new friends. That's something I remarked during that weekend -- when I asked how someone knew Carrie or they asked me, the answers were so different: classmates from college in California, from grad school in Wisconsin, from the companies where she worked, from the STC (technical communicators), from travels, from common interests. I met her through the STC connection and Janet, another STC friend came to the celebration from her island off the coast of Washington state. Janine knew Carrie through the University of Wisconsin, but I know Janine through the AAWE and we were surprised to see each other visiting Carrie at the hospital last year. Also, during those visits, I met Mary and I think we are now going to remain friends. This was Carrie's gift -- connecting people.
One night at home and then we were off to visit Emma. While there, we went for a day's excursion to Conques. It's a charming village. The abbey and church were in the center of the town. The story of how they got the relic of Sainte Foy is fairly common for the time. A monk from the Conques abbey spent a year at the abbey where the relic was, then. After his year with them, the brothers trusted him enough to spend a night guarding the relic and, you guessed it, he quickly left, with the relic, to return to Conques. The brothers could not bring themselves to accuse another brother of theft, so they decided that it was a simple transfer, the saint's will to move and this put Conques on the Compostelle pilgrimage path. It's a big 12th century church and the abbey hostel is still in use. The church's treasure of triptychs and relic chests are no longer in the church, but in a part of the cloister that has set aside for it, well worth the visit.
In the fictional Cadfaël books, The Holy Thief is about a very similar event. The action takes place in Shrewsbury. There's a spring flood and the relic of St. Winifred is moved in case the water should enter the church. There happens to be visitors from another abbey and they leave as soon as the water starts receding. When it's time to bring the relic back from where it was safely stored, lo and behold, they bring it back and unwrap it, but lo and behold, it's not the relic!
I'm now reading the last, the twentieth, of the series. I've had a good time visiting the 12th century.
My visit to the 12th century was interrupted by James Comey's book. He presents himself well.

Ouistreham

Second World War buffs know about Ouistreham. It's a small town at the mouth of the Orne river on the English Channel, the port of Caen, the main city 14 kilometers inland. You cross the Pegasus Bridge to get here. The movie "The Longest Day" is supposedly about the liberation, here, but they didn't shoot it here, so the geography is wrong and so are some of the events.

Notice the thick columns

I'm in Ouistreham for the day because we are celebrating Carrie's life, today. I got here yesterday afternoon and walked into town to see what there was to see. Ouistreham is very small. There's a church, which used to be an abbey, called Saint Samson. It was built in the 12th century, Romanesque architecture and since I'm still reading the Cadfael books, it's good to see the architecture of the time -- mid-twelveth century. Of course all of the windows in the church are modern, but there are few of stained glass windows. There's one in particular which is a commemoration of the British liberation.  

Ouistreham was the eastern extremity of Sword Beach. It's not where they landed, but rather where there was (is, now a museum) six-storey German bunker. If you think that bunkers are small enterred structures along the beach, well, this one and others like it along the Atlantic front were enormous, six stories high and when you get to the top, you have a panoramic view of the beach. On D-Day, I'm sure they had a clear view. Now, there are so many houses and trees, you don't even see the beach right in front. The Germans had razed the whole seafront by 1942. There was a casino not far and it was razed in 1942, but somehow, in the movie, The Longest Day, it was decided to show its destruction on D-Day. I visited this bunker today and it's interesting -- not as interesting as that Arromanches museum, thought. It's in pretty bad condition at almost 80 years. I don't know if it will have a natural death when the iron reinforcements finally give way, or if they'll end up taking it down. It was not captured on D-Day, but rather on June 9th, as the troops progressed towards Caen

Now the beach is for sports. There's lots of wind on the beach for "sailing". I have no idea how far out the sea was. I didn't go that far.

From the port to the church

We took a boat out to international waters to disperse Carrie's ashes. It was a moving moment. There were so many of us that the boat had to make three trips out. I was in the first group. There are always moments of sadness at these celebrations of life but those moments are offset by the happiness of seeing old friends and some friends that we just recognize from our hospital visits. We're going out to dinner later this evening. I'm sure we'll have a celebration!

As we were coming back to port the ferry from Portsmouth caught up to us. The hotel I'm staying at is right across the street from the ferry terminal.