For Americans especially, visiting Normandy means standing on Omaha Beach and in the American Cemetery.

Seen in 2017, the five D-Day invasion beaches stretch gracefully and peacefully along the Normandy coast.  At low tide, they gradually climb from water's edge over wide sandy expanses sporadically visited, after summer crowds have left, by dog walkers, beach combers, farm tractors launching and retrieving boats and shell-fish traps, and tourists trying to comprehend how differently these seascapes must have looked and sounded and smelled on June 6, 1944.  It is impossible to reconcile the timeless serenity of this quintessentially pastoral French place in 2017 with the terrors and horrors of the first day of the invasion.  Lulled, too, by intermittent blue skies and gentle breezes and nearby cottages and the fancy homes of Trouville, a visitor has few hints of history to temper the sense of well-being.  The last relics of the invasion's Mulberry harbors are graphically striking, but are no more jarring or out of place to modern eyes than rocky reefs.

First view: at dusk, the Mulberry relics off Arromanches.  Below: a Mulberry spud pier as night falls

Next day, Spud Pier 449 embedded at low tide

Tourists use the spud pier as a backdrop. 

The 24-foot tides rise quickly.

Some of the floating causeway segments still lie in the Arromanches sand.

Multi-image panorama of the Arromanches beach

Arromanches from the museum above

Gold Beach, off the town of Asnelles

This is Omaha Beach.  Unutterably peaceful, now. The shallow grade exposes a wide beach at low tide.  There are no obstacles, now.  

Omaha Beach.  Quiet now, the bluff was lethal in 1944.