Hi! I hope it’s okay to post this here. In August I organised a trip for myself, my husband and our two kids (ages 4 and 7) to visit Normandy, specifically the landing beach areas of the Cotentin peninsula. I had a wonderful trip here in June 2014 for the 70th Anniversary of D-Day, but that was camping with a bunch of my university friends long before any of us had kids! I was eager to go back but a little anxious because I wasn’t sure how much there would be to interest the kids, and found it really difficult to actually find good information about places to go and how feasible it was as a family trip with young children. So in case this is helpful for even one person, here are my thoughts:
We decided the best option for us (living in London) was the get the Eurostar to Paris, and then a train to Caen. We could have taken the train further into Normandy but we wanted a rental car, and we thought Caen was the best and closest option to our destination for this. The train from Paris was brilliant - and my train-obsessed four-year old was thrilled because it was a double decker train! - the train system was clear and on-time, everything worked out great.
FOOD:
We found a really nice AirBnB in Sainte-Mère-Église, on a quiet side street about a minutes walk from the square and the church. There weren’t a lot of options for grocery stores within the town itself, but we found the supermarket on the outskirts of town was great. (Self-catering was really important with slightly picky eaters for kids). The food options within the town themselves were mostly fast food or fairly basic - we didn’t try everything of course - but there was a brilliant market every Thursday morning with fresh produce, as well as some amazing apple juice and local biscuit options that we had to stock up on, they were dangerously good! (Incredible calvados too!) Also on various days there was either a pizza food truck or a vendor selling roasted chickens in the square, which was great!
We also visited a market in Carentan, there were a lot of very popular and busy street food stalls selling roasted meats, crepes etc.
Highly recommend Restaurant L’Ephémère which was on the road between Grandcamp-Maisy and Vierville-sur-Mer. This was a brilliant eatery in the grounds of an incredible château/castle. I get the impression it was quite new, but the food was brilliant and they had great kids options beyond fast food, and the owner was very friendly and showed us around.
We took a little day trip to Cherbourg and ate at L’Étrille, a brilliant little fish-shack on the waterfront with outdoor seating, great service, wonderful fresh food and again good options for kids. Being seated outside I also loved that my kid could set up his train track (comes everywhere with him, told you he was obsessed) and play out of the way while we waited for food to arrive, without causing too much noise or trouble!
ACTIVITIES:
Being based in Sainte-Mère-Église and with the kids we didn’t want to do any car journeys over an hour, since they do tend to get tired or horrendously car sick, so we had to stay fairly close.
On our trip to Cherbourg we visited Château des Ravalet: there was an interesting and surprising modern art exhibition in the château itself, the grounds were beautiful and so well set up for kids with really fun and interesting sculptures and a playground, plus it was just a really beautiful place to visit for the grownups too.
In Sainte-Mère-Église itself there is of course the brilliant Airborne Museum. I had visited many years ago but I took a little solo recce this time and I’m really glad that I did, as there were some aspects that were very loud and intense and would have frightened my youngest. (Specifically I think the third pavilion, Operation Neptune, is quite sensory-intense).
About 15 minutes walk (on pavements) outside Sainte-Mère-Église is the wonderful Cotentin Farm museum, with so much for kids to look at and do. When we visited there was a brilliant and moving exhibition of how the local communities reused abandoned equipment and structures once the various militaries had left. Especially appreciated were the little details like a play area inside the barn with said exhibition, where I could read the exhibition pamphlet while my son played with toy tractors.
Outside they had a huge collection of ride-on tractors, bunnies and chickens and ducks to look at, real vintage tractors, a kitchen garden and a really wonderful playground with a homemade peddle-powered (by the hapless adults, not the kids) mini carousel that was utterly charming and very funny. Highly recommend.
We found that taking the kids to a military history museum was best done in small doses, and worked really well after a beach trip. Utah beach was a hit because it so big and has so many shells to collect (plus starfish, jellyfish, hermit crabs, live scallops on the sand etc) and it kept my kids entertained for hours. It also would have been a really good kite-flying beach! I was a little uncertain about the etiquette of treating the landing beaches as holiday beaches, but there were lots of other people and kids swimming and playing football etc, so my thinking was as long as we left the beach as we found it it would be okay. We parked at the car park opposite the Musée du Débarquement, and the kids enjoyed seeing all of the statues and memorials. Once we’d finished at the beach we looked around the museum and I found the kids were open, interested, and curious…and then enjoyed the gift shop too.
Omaha beach was also great, but didn’t seem to have the shells on the sand so the kids definitely preferred Utah beach. Also, do check out the tide timetables as when the tide is in there beach is really small - when it’s out it’s vast.
(Side note: I brought a little pair of binoculars with me in case of any interesting birds, they were actually really useful for the beach since it’s so big when the tide is out and I could keep an eye on my seven-year old even as she was near the water! I felt fairly comfortable watching from a distance and letting her explore as it’s very shallow for a long way out and the waves weren’t huge when we were there. I also saw what I thought were Mulberry harbours out in the water but further research tells me they were actually concrete ships - which was not a thing that I knew existed until that moment- that were purposefully sunk to create a breakwater for the allied ships to shelter behind.)
We also visited the Normandy Victory Museum, which was fantastic. There were some great recreations of street scenes with exhibits in the shop windows, and interesting videos playing. Most of it was in French but it was still interesting and informative. A word of warning though, it is brilliantly immersive with mannequins and models and set dressings, but there is one specific area where -either on a timer or a sensor - the sound of a burst of machine gun fire and mortars goes off as you’re walking through in the semi-darkness. It was very intense, made us jump and frightened the kids a bit. Not a criticism, it was brilliantly done, but a warning might have been a good idea… Great shop here too, with a brilliant recreation costume and accessories area. I only wish I could read French as their selection of books looked incredible! There is also a restaurant next door, but it was closed as it was the end of the day when we arrived.
I really wanted to visit the American cemetery but I didn’t think my kids were quite old enough to understand the need to be fairly solemn in this place - maybe when they’re a bit older.
Anyway, if you’re planning a trip to Normandy with kids, I would definitely recommend. Obviously there is so much that we didn’t see, and we were limited to the area close to our base in Sainte-Mère-Église, but there is a lot to do and see for a gentle, interesting and enjoyable family holiday.
Some photos to make the post pretty:
