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Bayeux has come through history amazingly intact, and even now remains a quiet backwater of a place, no suburbs to speak of, no commercial loop road like St. Lo. A blessing it wasn't leveled in the fighting during the summer of '44.

If its a tourist enclave today that's not always a bad thing. It was just a nice place to hang out in a sidewalk cafe, and its only seven miles inland from the D-Day beaches.





The tapestry photos again, the sign said "no photos" but I discretely took a couple of quick shots, no flash.





Ya know, I finally got to watch some of the highly touted "Game of Thrones" HBO series on the nine and a half hour flight from Heathrow to Dallas this past Monday. I found it silly, sorta like a Dark Ages "Star Trek" wherein they could just make stuff up, in this case magic forces as necessary to advance the plot. Worse, it subscribes to the present PC fallacies of women in combat.

But, fans of that series will be familiar with this general scenario: Just north of Bayeux on the Normandy Coast, "La Sente au Batard". "William the Bastard's path", still remembered by that name more'n 900 years after the fact.





1036, William's father Richard (who may have previously poisoned his own brother) died during his return from a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. William, the eight year-old presumptive heir, was immediately placed in peril on account of his homicidal uncles and cousins. Somehow he survived the next ten years as a political pawn but matters came to a head when he reached eighteen years of age.

With the help of allies he was able to slip out from amongst his enemies to friendlier ground around Falais. The route he took on that precipitous flight became known as La Sente au Batard.

No worries, 20 years later he would became the last foreign invader to successfully invade England where he is commonly remembered today as William the Conqueror. Eleven years after that, half-brother Bishop Odo commissions the creation of the Bayeux Tapestry, giving the Norman side of the story.