PARIS IS A DUMP, BUT NORMANDY WAS AWESOME (hire a guide though):

SAINTE-MERE-EGLISE, France (AP) -- Andree Auvray, nine months pregnant, was hiding from German bombings in a Normandy ditch with her husband one night in June 1944 when their dogs started barking. The shadows of three soldiers appeared.

"We both came out to see what was going on," she recalls. She initially thought the men were the Nazi occupiers who had upended life in her quiet farming village. "And then I said 'No, it's not the Germans!'

The soldiers were Americans. D-Day had begun.

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