Happy St. Joseph’s Day!

-Today was our last day on the ship. We disembarked the ship and visited the Peace Memorial Museum in Caen, a state-of-the-art facility that vividly presents the events of World War II, including D-Day. It was an excellent way to put into context what we saw at the Normandy Beaches.

The museum is under renovation to expand the story of the Holocaust in France. They are also working on a new exhibit that will give the history of the war starting with 1914. If you don’t understand what happened in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, you will never fully understand why World War II happened. The museum was started by a grandfather who had survived World War II and refused to speak about it until one day his grandson asked him about the war, and once he started speaking about it, he could not stop. He decided it was important to save the memories and tell the story of the war and France.

At the museum, we visited the bunker, which was the German stronghold in Caen. The museum then starts with the beginning of the war and goes all the way to 1945. There is a section on the Cold War. There were also movie posters. A number of the movies that came out at this time were against the Nazi regime.

Throughout the museum, there were short videos of actual footage of the war. There was also a section on the American war in the Pacific.

At the museum and when we were at the American Cemetery, there are always groups of French school children coming to visit these memorials.

I am not sure if France learned its lessons from the war. I asked our guide why France, who surrendered six weeks after the German invasion and lived under oppression for four years, clung to their colonies after the war.

The French fought viciously to hold on to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. They fought in Morocco and in Algiers. They finally stopped fighting to keep their colonies in 1992. Geraldine said France was a small country and they needed places around the world to have army bases. They also needed the oil and minerals. France has very little.

Antisemitism in France is on the rise. They have over 1500 incidents every year.

I asked Geraldine about the graffiti — when I was here as a teenager there was no graffiti. She said the government has decided to leave the graffiti in place because if they take it off it just reappears; the graffiti artists wear a mask and cannot be identified. I don’t think they’re trying hard enough.

If a private home has graffiti on it, the homeowner must pay to remove it. Most homeowners just leave it because it will reappear. They will only remove the graffiti on a monument.

Geraldine said the problem is with the illegal aliens that France has allowed to enter their country and is doing very little to stop it. She’s in full support of Trump removing our illegal aliens. She wishes France would follow suit.

We arrived in Paris and stayed at a hotel near the airport. Bob and I had dinner with a lovely woman named Betty at a crêpe restaurant. We had never seen Betty on the ship. She was in a different group. Bob generously treated her to dinner and she kept trying to give Bobby money. She then begged us to let her buy us a glass of wine and we said no, we have an early flight tomorrow. I wish we would’ve met her sooner.

I am enclosing a picture of the back of my jacket. My jacket as well as my vest have been photographed throughout this trip. People admired my family service to America. I said except for me everyone else was in war. I'm truly glad we came on this trip and that I returned to Paris, however, Bobby has not seen enough of Paris so I must bring him back.

God willing I’m looking forward to taking a World War One tour starting in Belgium and ending in Paris because that’s where my grandfathers fought. You have to understand World War I to understand World War II.

I’m also hoping to do a pilgrimage of Joan of Arc in France.

We are flying home tomorrow; we land in Newark and then transfer to a plane to Jacksonville. I am not able to return from a vacation without going to urgent care. At the beginning of the trip, I fell and hurt my chest and I picked up a horrible cold.

Bobby and I are both looking forward to our next adventure in April. Stay tuned.