Our second day in Normandy wasn't quite as action-packed as our first. We started off by going back to the American Cemetery in Normandy for me to lay out the flowers I'd bought the day before. Since we sort of stumbled upon the cemetery without trying, I'd left the flowers I'd bought in the car and we never made it back that afternoon. So we made a quick trip back to Colleville-sur-Mer for me to pay tribute to the soldiers there. I put a white rose next to the first Texas soldier I found and then put the rest on the unmarked graves for those missing in action or never identified.
After the cemetery we headed to a couple sites I'd found the night before that are relatively unknown. Our first stop was Longues-sur-Mer, to the East of Juno beach (far East of Omaha beach). Longues-sur-Mer was where the Germans had placed a number of huge anti-naval guns that we discovered where, with the exception of one hit by an American shell, where remarkably well-preserved. It was a very wide-open and beautiful landscape, but there was an annoying amount of French youth eating lunch and hanging out on the guns and running around the pillboxes. 
Our last stop in Normandy was the seaside village of Arromanches, where the other temporary harbor was built to bring in troops and supplies in the weeks and months after the initial invasion. Unlike in Vierville-sur-Mer, however, the harbor at Arromanches survived and parts are relatively still intact today. We drove down to the waterfront and just walked their seawall for a few minutes. You can still see many of the sunken vessels that the engineers used to stop the breakwaters and establish a relatively calm harbor. 
After Arromanches, we got in the car and headed for Dunkirk, the city on the French/Belgian border that was where 320,000 French and British troops were evacuated from when the Germans encircled them. However, Dunkirk was not the sleepy village that all of our other siteseeing places had been, and without GPS or knowledge of the sites in Dunkirk we were forced to keep on going. We continued all the way to Brussels and checked into our hotel. To end the evening, we just got a good Belgian restaurant recommendation and then had a drink at some famous pub bar that features a couple hundred beers on tap.
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