The trip, and this site

This site documents my 9-day Band of Brothers tour with Beaches of Normandy Tours, September 10–18, 2026. One trip, nine days, four countries — not a general guide, and not a collection of several visits.

Where things stand

The trip has not happened yet. Everything here was written beforehand: the itinerary as the operator publishes it, the history behind each stop, and what I expect to find. Every day carries a badge saying whether it is planned or travelled, so you never have to guess which you are reading.

None of the nine days have been travelled yet. After 18 September 2026 I will rewrite each entry with what actually happened and swap in my own photographs.

About the photographs

The 39 photographs on this site are not from the September 2026 trip. They were taken on an earlier tour of the same route in July 2023, and they are here because a picture of a wire fence in front of a green field means nothing unless you know it is Brécourt Manor, and two shallow dips in a pine wood mean nothing unless you know men lived in them for a month at minus twenty.

Each gallery says where its photographs came from, and so does the lightbox, so a picture that gets shared on its own still carries its provenance. Original album:

Band of Brothers Tour in Europe, July 2023

Two of them — Juno Beach and Pegasus Bridge — show places this nine-day itinerary does not actually visit; they sit further east, and their captions say so. The longer eleven-day version of the tour goes there.

The itinerary

Nine days, running Paris → Normandy → Bastogne → Luxembourg → Munich → Berchtesgaden. Day 1 is an airport pickup at Charles de Gaulle and a transfer straight to Normandy, so despite the name there is no day in Paris. Luxembourg is not a separate day either — the American Cemetery and Patton’s grave are a run south from Bastogne on Day 5.

Days 2 and 3 cover Utah, Omaha, Pointe du Hoc and Gold. Days 4 and 5 cover the Bulge. Day 7 is Dachau, Day 8 the Eagle’s Nest — weather permitting, which the operator is careful to say. Day 9 is the flight home, which has to leave Munich after 10:00.

Why build it before going

Partly to know what I am looking at when I get there. Mostly because these places reward preparation more than almost anywhere else I have travelled: the ground is unremarkable until you know what happened on it, and there is not much time at each stop to work that out from scratch.

So every entry does the same thing in the same order: what happened here in 1944, and then what this day of the tour is. The two registers are set in different typefaces throughout so you can always tell which one you are reading. After the trip the second register becomes what actually happened, and nothing else about the structure changes.

A note on Dachau

The entry for Day 7 does not describe or photograph the interior of the camp beyond the gate, and it will not after the trip either. The memorial site documents itself far better than I could, it is free to enter, and it is thirty minutes from central Munich. If you want to know, go.

Acknowledgements

To the men of Easy Company, and to the roughly 19,000 Americans killed in the Ardennes and the 9,388 buried above Omaha Beach, most of whom were younger than anyone reading this.

Also to the towns — Sainte-Mère-Église, Bastogne, Bayeux, Foy — that have spent eighty years keeping this ground legible for visitors, and to the volunteers and guides who do the work of remembering out loud.

How the site is built

Static site, no tracking, no third-party requests at runtime. Astro with MDX content collections, Tailwind CSS, and Leaflet for the map on CARTO Positron tiles. Fonts are Archivo and Source Serif 4, self-hosted at build time. Photographs are resized and served as modern formats by Astro’s image pipeline. The whole thing deploys as a folder of files.

Editing a day means editing one MDX file in src/content/journey/ — the map, the timeline, the journal index and the sitemap all pick it up automatically.