Written by Wesley Klehm
We headed out early again towards Cherbourg. We stopped in Carentan first to go to a tank museum. There were a bunch of tanks, jeeps, trucks and other vehicles. It was actually really well done. The setup of the mannequin soldiers around the vehicles was an accurate portrayal of the war and what it would have looked like.
Next we headed down the road a little ways to Dead Man’s Corner. At this location there was a tank that was disabled and the commander of it killed. But he was left hanging over the side of it for days, so the corner was dubbed as such. There was a museum there in the house where a german paratrooper group had set up their command post and hospital. Upstairs there was a bunch of gear donated by members of easy company. Most notably, Major Richard Winters had left much of his stuff to this museum. Band of Brothers allowed us to get to know some of the guys of easy company, but then to see some of the gear of men from the company made it all the more real.
We visited the gift shop, which itself was larger than the museum. It was filled with real and fake stuff from the war. It looked like a vendor for reenactments. Sterling bought me a chain of bullets from an MG42 as a birthday present. How awesome is that! We left and headed up to Cherbourg. Our primary goal was the Muse de Cite. Its a museum on the port with lots of sea related stuff. There was an early model of the the submersible that James Cameron used to go to the Challenger Deep.
Sterling finally accepted that someone went down there. There was also a nuclear submarine and a audio tour of it. It was a really interesting tour and it showed all of the parts and generally what was in it. I knew how big subs can be, but seeing one in person put it in a whole new perspective.
There were two other parts of the museum. One was a Titanic exibit. But..but…they didn’t have anything! There was a screen with some rolling ocean projected on it (and a bunch of people sitting and watching it). There was a reproduced bathroom and bedroom. But that was basically it. It looked like wikipedia had been printed out and posted along the wall to make it look like they had more, but it was a pretty pathetic exibit. And then there was the interactive show/game. It wasn’t either of those things though. The premise was that we were part of a secret mission that would explore the deep, but it was super weird. The kicker was that they were secretly taking pictures of us in the various weird rooms we had to walk into. At the end there was a press release video where our pictures were inserted into the video as the heroes of the expedition. It was really weird and also very weird. We left the museum starving and went into city center and found a little cafe that was open. The food was mediocre at best. We left and made one last stop at the Azeville artillery battery.
We explored a bit and considered jumping the fence, but decided against it. This battery was very cool because the bunkers were painted as if they were old houses. I was satisfied with the bunker and headed back to the B&B, tired and hungry. Again we got back to late for dinner, everything was closed.
There and back again 