Today Brayden and I decided to go to the National D-Day Memorial in the town close by. Our hosts had recommended it but all Brayden needed to hear was the word D-Day and he was hooked. That kid has a fascination with World War II for sure. Apparently this town lost more men per capita that any other in the country. We were going to find out more today for sure. Laney decided to join us and Ryan decided to stay with Emily and Evey for the morning.
After about a 15 minute drive we pulled into the D-Day Memorial and were impressed by the sheer size of the place! We'd heard the survivors of the war in the community made it their life work to create a memorial for the friends they'd lost as well as so many others that lost their lives that day and in the months after.
I can't even begin to do the memorial justice by describing it here so I'll just leave you with pictures. It was a somber, sobering, patriotic, inspiring, and heartbreaking experience.
Brayden thoroughly enjoyed the memorial and at the end we realized the day before was actually 6-6-18 - the anniversary of D-Day. We couldn't decide if it would have been better or worse to visit the day before. We stopped by the gift shop to buy a couple books and support the memorial. Brayden and Laney loved the WWII era posters so they each bought one of those too.
We decided to stop by Walmart for a quick resupply and the visitor's center to see if Brayden's water bottle turned up. Somehow he ends up losing his water bottle on our trips! No luck with the water bottle but once we got back we did make a delicious lunch and headed back out toward the town for the ice cream we'd spotted a few days back.
The little store was crammed full of all kinds of homemade everything but the kids wouldn't let me browse. We all picked out our different flavors - peach for me, Emily & Laney, banana for Brayden, cantaloupe for Ryan, and strawberry for Evey. Delicious! We picked a shady spot to enjoy our ice cream and called Dave since we had pretty good service. I'm sure he doesn't appreciate us calling when we're eating ice cream and he's at work!
When we arrived back at the campground we headed back down to the creek for our last afternoon.
It's hard to tell with nothing for perspective, but this bullfrog was seriously bigger than my hand. Evey was determined to catch him but he had other plans.
The others were back to roll and run down the hill. Laney wore long everything so she could roll down the hill this night too!
Back at the site I got everything organized from our resupply and ready for our drive the next day. We had an easy dinner and once we were ready for bed we decided to start a new Clarke tradition. We all walked the entire campground before bed and were treated to quite the examples of wildlife!
Earlier when Ryan and I took the trash to the dumpster we spotted a doe with a new fawn. We couldn't get over how adorable they were! On our walk we spotted another doe that let us walk right past her on the other side of the road. Whatever she was eating must have been very good!
About 15 minutes later when we had almost reached our campsite I did the mom-protection-arm-block to all the kids as there was a 4-ft snake laying in the road just in front of us! We walked around it and I whispered for Emily to come down out of her tent to see.
Brayden spotted the rattler so we were definitely looking at a nice-sized rattlesnake. He was frozen and very patient while we all shined our lights at him and ogled. Needless to say the kids were attached to me for the remainder of the night!
You guys are having way too much fun. We've been getting some of that rain and nastiness but are not camping outdoors! D-Day memorial looks really interesting. I was fascinated with D-Day as well. My Dad was not there, he was in the Navy in the Mediterranean, but he had several really cool books about the war. I'm going to Hayward tomorrow. If those books are still up there, I'll bring them to Bray, not sure they're still there though.
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