Suggest an Itinerary for WWII battle sites
 

I am taking my 85 year old father to revisit the Normandy Beaches and the Battle of the Bulge warsites. He also wants to visit Patton's grave in Luxembourg. We're flying into Paris. Is this "doable" in seven days? Should we travel by train or rent a car? Would there be any time available for a short Paris visit?

That's quite a bit to cover in 7 days. We have done both areas - but on separate trips - and we're not 85.

I would suggest you rent a car (much easier on your farther, since many sites are not near any train station) and the more you change trains, track down cabs etc the more tiring it will be.

You may want to spend you first day in Paris - to get over jet lag and see 1 or 2 sights by cab. Then I would rent a car and head out.

Be sure you do as much research in advance as possible because - esp in Luxmbourg - there are a lot of small local museums that don;t get a lot of attention. We were lucky in that we fell into one of these when looking for a place to have lunch.

There we met some British seniors (former soldiers showing their wives where it all happened) who were doing a similar trip - but in depth. And they gave us info on many more places than we had heard of - only a couple of which we were able to fit in. Some of these places are fascinating, since they really deal with just what happened in a 10 mile or so radius of that particular town. And some have a huge number of exhibits from both sides - not really catalogued that well - but fascinating to see.

"Doable" in 7 days depends on your dad's energy level and how well he will recover from jet lag. My mother at 85 could do it. My dad at 85 could not.

The Michelin Green Guide for Normandy is an excellent source for a driving tour of the D-Day sights. I would think there are Green Guides for the other areas you would be travelling to/through.

Take a good road map of the area, but also look at the road maps for sale at highway gas stations. We ended up finding a more detailed (and helpful) map after we arrived.

Visit the Peace Museum in Caen. Depending on the itinerary you chose, it might work well to stop there after leaving Paris and before reaching your first hotel.

Have a great trip with your dad. Normandy and the D-Day sights remains one of our most enjoyable trips to Europe.

If you rent and drive everywhere, you will use up a lot of energy (and I don't mean gasoline). Personally, I would spend my first day and night in Paris, take the last train of the second day to Bayeux, and bed down.

Next morning, rent a car locally, and range up and down the invasion area for two days. Stop at the Mulberry Museum at Arromanches, and gobble some seafood at Port-en-Bessin. The Bayeux Cathedral and Tapestery are worthy sights to see, as is the Peace Museum at Caen. Take the last train to Paris and overnight there.

Next day, see some Paris and get the 18h39 TGV from Gare de l'Est to Luxembourg. Sleep, rent a car, and wander around the Ardennes/Patton sights for a couple of days, then turn in the car. If you can fly back from Luxembourg, it would avoid backtracking all the way to Paris. If you can't, maybe you can get a good fare from Brussels.

Get Michelin map #102. It's a commemorative edition showing not only the roads in Normandy, but all the Overlord troop dispositions and descriptions of battles. Also, map #105 shows the area of the Bulge, but since I haven't seen one, I can't tell you what's inside.

Day - Hotel in
1 - Paris
2 - Bayeux
3
4 - Paris
5 - Luxembourg
6
7 - [Departure city]

(You <u>could</u> go straight from Normandy to Belgium on the same day (skipping the day in Paris), but the train connections would stretch the trip out to a 7-hour ordeal.)

I'll leave it to you to decide whether to combine trains with car rentals. Your dad might need the night in Paris in the middle. My dad would have wanted to avoid big-city Paris in favor of staying in a small town, and, for various physical reasons, he would have preferred travelling by car rather than train. But ask your dad what he's up for.

One advantage to the car rental option is that you can follow the U.S./Allied advance toward Germany. (Yes, some U.S. troops went to Paris, but the greater number stayed north of the city.) It's about 400 miles from Bayeux to Luxembourg which sounds like a lot in total but really not bad over a few days.