Day 3 - In which I visit a tank museum

June 3 - Big excitement - tank museum day!

When I received the itinerary for this tour - about 14 months after I had booked it in faith - the item "Bovington Tank Museum" really caught my attention and made me wonder what the heck I had signed up for. ME? At a TANK museum? Alta (a co-traveler) put this into perspective for me when she said that her daughter Jacqueline's intonation of the same phase would be, "ME! At a TANK museum!" I began to look forward to it more.

We were off early in the morning for - yes - the tank museum. We drove to Dorset, through some of the areas where many of the pre-invasion GI camps and billets had been. Paul explained to us that so many millions of Allied troops had been funneled into England for D-Day there simply hadn't been room for them all anywhere near the south coast, and their concentrations had in fact been spread out all the way to Ireland. No wonder the Brits felt a bit cramped back then.

The road into the tank museum (there I go again) was the very road on which T. E. Lawrence had come a-cropper on his famous motorcycle. Quite sobering yet thrilling as well. I had visited the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in June 2012 (part of my Queen's Jubilee trip) in the expectation of seeing Lawrence's actual Arab robes, and was bitterly disappointed to find out they were out on loan. Who can think of him without picturing that iconic scene of Peter O'Toole trying out the curved dagger and the swashbuckling effect of his first Arab garments, preening before his own billowing shadow on the sand?

Back to tanks. Now this is a museum worth the trip. The Bovington Tank Museum has examples of almost every tank ever built, from the very first "land ship" to the latest thing. I won't attempt to sketch the history of tanks in this blog - you can look it up. It was fascinating to see actual DD tanks - a.k.a. Hobart's Funnies. These were Sherman tanks that had ingenious modifications made to them so they could perform targeted tasks such as flailing through barbed wire fortifications or uprooting bocage. The latter was of prime importance. Bocage = hedgerows, and the bocage in Normandy is impossibly dense and tall - much taller than the invasion planners had estimated based on their aerial reconnaissance photos. Bocage served as ideal defensive positions for the German troops and a solution for clearing them was critical.

The Tank Museum gift shop was one of the most fun and unique I have ever seen. As you can imagine.

At this point I owe a shout-out to Paul's clever wife, for she provided, in absentia, an enrichment to our afternoon itinerary which was dear to my heart. As we were in the Salisbury area, she suggested we stop at Salisbury Cathedral. The cathedral is about as ancient as cathedrals get, has the tallest spire in Europe, and is home to two of the original copies of Magna Carta. Not to sound trite, but it, too, has a fantastic gift shop. Whenever I go there I buy Irish linen tea towels from their beautiful selections. On my first visit, one chill December, the tea shop was serving mince pies and mulled wine (to go, if you liked), and I was so charmed by the idea that I instituted my almost-annual mince pies and mulled wine post-Christmas parties.

We slept that night at the Holiday Inn near Stonehenge, and the American-style accommodations were balm to the soul. We needed our rest as we had a 5:30 a.m. start next day. On to France!

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