Day 1. D day landings and exciting sat nav

Day one saw us landing at Caen. I'm not quite sure why an alarm call is compulsory over an hour before docking, but 5.15 was our wake up time. 

We quickly showered and dressed before hanging around a lot before being allowed down to our bikes. 

We had discussed an initial ride to Pegasus bridge, an important bridge fought for in the Normandy battles, so made our way there straight from the ferry. We could see it quite easily for the main road out of Caen so quickly found ourselves outside some locked gates peering through at the bridge and other artefacts. One being a glider used to take men and machinery into this battle. This was how many of the allied troops arrived into battle so I understand. 

It's certainly worth a look but I would suggest getting there a little later in the day once gates are unlocked. The downside of a rather early docking on the Caen ferry I guess. 

We checked our sat navs at this point as we wanted to have a look at a landing beech or two. It was at his point I noticed that when I put French town names into my machine that they weren't being found. It seems that a recent update had only loaded UK maps while deleting all other maps. Not the end of the world of course, we had the sat nav on Bryan's machine and a map backup. Sounds simple. Maybe not so. 

We entered a town name that would take us near to Juno beach initially and I set off following Bryan. Noting as we went that we seemed to be heading southwest, a little odd I thought as I knew the area we were looking for should be northeast from our start point. 'It'll reroute' I thought. It did, lots!

We eventually followed our noses and arrived at Juno beach to find some rather well preserved machine gun stations and some impressive monuments. Worth a look. 

We comtinued the follow our noses technique, I'd looked at the map, and found Omaha beach and then the rather impressive American cemetery nearby. I've loaded a picture of the graves at the American site. It's beautifully laid out and good to see such care taken over the site. 

We had spent all morning looking around the sites so felt we should head south to southeast to Orleans next. We had a hotel booked and wanted to get the 200 miles done in time to get something to eat in the evening. Bryan programmed the sat nav again and off we set, northeast. A little distrust in the machine crept into my mind which a decided to ignore for now as we continued in the same direction for about 30 miles. Eventually I passed Bryan and indicated the we could head a little south, we did this and stopped for a light sandwich and a chat about where to head. I lead the way aiming largely south with and easterly inflection from time to time. Trying all the time to avoid going toward Caen. Caen 15kms said a sign. I headed further south. Caen 9kms said another, then Caen 7kms. It was at this point that we realised one of the lesser known rules of cosmology. That being, the sun has the greatest gravitational pull in our solar system. That's followed by Jupiter, eventually earth and the moon, but not far behind is Caen. It's own gravitational pull dragging in unwary motorcyclists from all directions. Be wary of it if you go that way. 

We spent the next few hours heading toward Orleans. The sat nav seemingly working well until we got close when, apparently, we needed to have an unguided tour of a number of industrial estates and a hospital car park. After half an hour of this we decided to ignore the satnav and I headed toward where I thought we were staying. I'm happy to say we booked into our hotel 20 minutes later, having travelled a aliteracy more than our predicted miles but happy to get a rest.