Hey all,
Sitting on my balcony in Stuttgart, drinking Brittany cider out of a mug, just returned (tonight!) from what was for us the biggest road trip we've taken in France. I'm going to write a more detailed report later in this thread, once I've sorted through pictures, but here's a condensed version with some pertinent take-aways (opinionated as always) that might help other travelers.
Reims: We drove from Stuttgart, Germany to Reims the first day, arriving late afternoon. In general, I found Reims very underwhelming. The inner city is nice enough, but nothing special for a French city, and the amount of tacky tourist restaurants and difficulty finding a decent bar was a bit shocking. We did have a great dinner at a highly reviewed seafood restaurant on the main pedestrian street (details like names coming in the more comprehensive trip report) but we both got variations of steak tartare and spent the first 2-3 days of our trip with food poisoning as a result. The Cathedral is historically significant, obviously, and has great beauty, but as someone who nerds out on gothic churches I was a little underwhelmed. It wouldn't crack my top 10 of gothic churches in Europe. The champagne experiences in Reims were too expensive/crappy to bother with. Even on menus it was just as pricey as it is anywhere, and we didn't end up having any, actually.
Takeaway: We will visit the region again (my husband is a bit of a military history nerd and wants to see WWI sites) but I think we'll stay in one of the champagne villages known for production of the bubbly, which certainly has to be more charming than Reims itself.
Amiens: We stopped lunch and to see the cathedral. Although the city is now not exactly a metropolis, we enjoyed our brief visit there. The church is lovely, and we had a functional but friendly and cheap lunch by the river, which is a lovely area with some half-timbered houses. In retrospect, we wish we'd stayed in Amiens instead of Reims, as it was more charming and would've put us that much closer to our final destination that day.
Bayeux: We stayed here for two nights, and it's worth at least that, longer as a base if you're deep-diving into the D-Day stuff. It's an excellent base, the town itself is wonderful despite the tourists, and the Cathederal is astonishing. We missed the light show (we retired early on Tuesday, only to discover it doesn't run on Wednesday when we were feeling better.
Tip: If you're doing the D-Day museum or the art museum, buy your combo ticket for the Tapestry museum at the less popular museum(s). It enables you to skip the ticket purchasing line at the Tapestry museum, which saved us at least 30 minutes in line.
D-Day Sites: Despite my husband being a military history nerd, WWII isn't really his jam, and while I find the conditions surrounding the war fascinating, actual military tactics don't do that much for me. As such, we decided to do a fairly truncated version of D-Day sites. The museum in Bayeux gave us a detailed understanding of how the operation worked. The day after that, we drove to the German artillery site, part of the "Atlanik wall" which was very cool to see. We then visited the American Cemetery, spending about an hour at their nice visitor center (I really felt like I was back in the states, there's just a difference between American museums and European ones), and then after lunch at a little roadside restaurant actually stuck our toes in the sand at Omaha beach.
This may be heresy on this forum, but that was enough for us. We got a good overview of the fight, paid our respects to our countrymen, and stood on the site where many young men died hoping to liberate a country and win a war. It was very moving, especially the American cemetery, but we did not have enough of a detailed interest in the campaign to warrant the cost of a private tour or to spend more than a half-day on those sites.