It’s really the most remarkable thing. Remember what I wrote, about Jolie having a complete mental breakdown immediately upon being forced to take a vacation? She kept that up, naturally. After three days we despaired entirely of getting her to chill the hell out.
But.
We had this great plan to tour around the D-Day landing beaches, and we worked out a plan to get past Jolie’s psychosis. We knew she loved the beach in Honfleur; check it out:
So we decided to load her up into the car and drive there, throw the ball on the beach for as long as it took to get her to drop, and then continue on with Jolie snoozing contentedly in the back seat.
Don’t laugh; it could have worked!
What actually happened is this:
We got our stuff together, piled it into the trunk, and then Nick moved to slam it shut…nearly cutting Jolie in half in the process. For reasons none of us will ever understand, Jolie hurtled headfirst into the open trunk, and before anyone could shoo her out, I had an idea.
“Open the back!” I shouted, and saw Nick’s penny drop: while Deb watched us as carefully as anyone would watch unpredictably crazy people in the near vicinity, he hit the lever and shoved the backseat down flat on itself. Jolie wandered through into the main part of the car, we tossed Juliette in after her, and we rode around Normandy for over six hours in, I kid you not, total silence.
I mean, we talked. And there was music. But you know what I’m saying: we’re loading the dogs through the trunk every. single. time from now on; it was night and day.
So here’s what we saw:
(That’s what’s left of Pegasus Bridge. The beaches themselves looked pretty empty; what you’d want to see had been moved into outdoor museums.)
Even if it wasn’t quite screaming and whimpering the whole time, I like to think that even the dogs got into the spirit of things:
Good day.