CWT Journal – September 1, 2026 / Normandy

Today we traded four wheels for two, renting bikes in Bayeux and setting out through the Norman countryside toward the Longues-sur-Mer German Battery. One of the best-preserved remnants of Hitler's Atlantic Wall, the site still contains several enormous concrete casemates and their original 150-mm naval guns, positioned to command the waters between Omaha and Gold Beaches. Standing beside these leviathans made their purpose unnervingly tangible: keep the Allied invasion fleet away from France at any cost.

From there we rode along the coast to Arromanches-les-Bains, where we settled in by the water for a leisurely lunch and some much-needed repose. Then it was back onto the bikes for the pastoral ride home. By the time we rolled into Bayeux, we'd covered nearly 20 miles. The girls maintained a steady cadence all day and, remarkably, never complained. Dad was immensely proud.

We polished off our leftovers for dinner and settled in for a few more episodes of Band of Brothers—the perfect companion to a week spent walking and riding through the terrain where these events actually unfolded.

Something else unexpected has happened during our Normandy immersion. For the first 13 years of our marriage, Kristen assiduously avoided war movies; the prospect of watching soldiers die struck too close to the possibility of losing me during a deployment. But Saving Private Ryan and now Band of Brothers have catalyzed a change. Rather than recoil from the subject, she's become curious—asking about military customs, tactics, leadership, history, and my own experiences in the Army. I doubt military dramas will ever supplant horror as her preferred genre, but I've loved watching this curiosity emerge and sharing a part of my world that we rarely explored together.

There is something wonderfully recursive about it all: we came to Normandy to better understand its history, and somehow ended up understanding a little more about each other.