For anyone who is considering a D-Day tour, I would highly recommend Overlord tours (www.overlordtour.com). I found this recommendation in Rick's France book, and we were thrilled with our experience. Our guide (Rethro) was well educated on the battles he was walking us through (and the war in general), and made the stories come alive as he took us to the various locations.
We did the half day tour of Omaha in the afternoon. We took a train from Paris up to Bayeux in the morning and spent about four hours exploring the little town (it's beautiful and Rick's France book has good recommendations). It was easy to find our guide right in the heart of Bayeux after lunch, and afterward he dropped us off at the train station for us to catch a train back to Paris.
If you're interested in seeing some of D-Day's history, I think Overlord is a great choice!
Posted by
Vernon, Canada
32352 posts
sarah,
Thanks for the feedback. Overlord Tours is one that is frequently recommended, and it's nice to hear that you had such a great tour with them.
Posted by
Tucson
137 posts
We went on a Victory Tour in 2013. It was amazing. We were in a large van, so there were maybe eight of us. The driver (owner, but I can't remember his name - it's been almost four years :) ) was incredibly knowledgeable. He had notebooks of supplemental pictures to help us visualize what the beaches looked like on D-Day. It was a full day (7.5 hours) and we were never bored.
I believe it's important to find out when booking a tour, is WHO will be guiding you. We saw many tours as we moved up and down the coast, many of which were led by 20somethings. Our tour guide has been driving folks around for XXXX number of years and he had an entire day full of stories that he heard first hand from veterans that he had toured around when they came back to Normandy. These stories were a huge part of why we loved our day. I'm confident that Victory Tours is not the only one who has experienced tour guides - just make sure that YOUR guide is going to be experienced.
Just for fun, I'll tell you that the night before our tour we took an overnight boat from Portsmouth to Caen, arriving at some ridiculously early hour (we really had been vacationing in England, and added Normandy because it was a bucket list item for me). We took a train to Bayeux, which is a delightful little town (the windows of the cathedral are still missing from the war).
After the tour, we took the train to Paris. Right out of the Rick Steve's playbook, we ripped out his nighttime tour of Paris, handed it to a taxi-driver (it took a couple drivers to find one that agreed to do it), and drove around like crazy teenagers seeing the sights and taking selfies (it was our 20th wedding anniversary, so we were allowed to be silly). We flew out the following morning, and it was our one chance to see Paris.
We highly, highly recommend victorytours.com. More than that, I highly, highly, HIGHLY recommend visiting Normandy. You can't understand it until you go, but it is overwhelming.
Posted by
San Diego
1540 posts
We booked through Viator.com (a consolidator) and they booked us on 2 excellent tours which were conducted by Overlord.
We did a full day of Normandy and Beaches and Cemeteries
and
Another full day tour to Mont St. Michel
Our guide both days what a young man named Adrian and he was excellent, very knowledgeable, charming......