In May of 1994 I spent a week in Normandy, researching stories to run on the 50th anniversary of D-Day. It was one of the best and most moving trips I took in my 19 years as a travel editor, and it culminated in my finding, in the small town of Vouilly, Le Château that had served as the press corps’ headquarters in the days immediately following the invasion. Since then it had been turned into a bed & breakfast and, naturally, I spent the night. Before arriving there, I had stopped in the more famous town of Sainte-Mère-Église and visited its Airborne Museum. In the guestbook, a 15-year-old schoolboy named Benoît had written: “We must attempt, with these relics of the slow reconquest of liberty, to perpetuate the memory of that which no one has the right to forget.”
