Travels in our Jeans
  • Home
  • About Us
  • Travels and Tribulations (Blog)
  • Where's Molly?(Blog)
  • Recent Photos
  • Archive Photos
  • Links
  • Blogging Again in the Unutterable Year

Normandy

20/8/2010

0 Comments

 
Picture
The Church at PontL'eveque, post D-Day fighting and the break-out from Normandy
Picture
Today, one of many buildings (and entire towns) re-built after 1945
We stayed a night at Charles de Gaulle airport – a curious airport with seemingly dozens of terminals joined by trains, buses and walkways. No doubt a good set-up for most as you only go to one terminal per airport visit – normally.

For us it was a bit of a maze but eventually we found the terminal with car hire and the terminal with hotels (in our price range!) and made a night of it, before heading off towards Normandy the next day.

We were of course on the wrong side of Paris so we had no idea how to get to where we were going. First stop Carrefour, the French equivalent of Woolworths and Big W, all rolled into one huge building. Fortunately the Michelin road atlas we got was in all Euro languages so we now knew where we were going….sort of.

Quite by accident we went through Chantilly and discovered a magical castle come stately home with a huge horse training estate, race track and a town.

We also discovered that McDonalds really does have Le Royal burger and that in France McDonalds, you can serve yourself! Well, the ordering part you do yourself anyway!

Our aim was to get to Cambremer where our very good friends from when we lived in Malaysia have a house in a little French village. By a stroke of Luck Bruno was there longer than planned so we had decided to visit as soon as possible, partly the reason we left Paris before actually seeing the sights.

Regular visitors at the web-site might remember Bruno, Chrystel and their boys Remi and Guillame from such memorable blogs as the “tandem bikes around a Singaporean park” and “how many people can you fit in a 2+2 sports car in Singapore”!??!

As it turned out we missed Bruno and the boys when we arrived by about two hours but did find the house and made ourselves at home, deciding to stay on until Bruno returned in several days time.

Cambremer is a small village dedicated to growing, eating, destilling and drinking apples. Apple cider, apple liqueur and apple whisky (Calvados). It has a market on Sundays and our first morning we woke up to this – a town square full of pigs, chickens, people dressed as peasants and French folk music. Dancing takes place about every hour and various products are for sale, mostly apple based! Of course there is a plentiful supply of (really) smelly cheeses, sausages (fitting of a similar description as the cheese) and of course French sticks (which in France they call baguettes!! Go figure?!!?).

We visited other small villages, found the locals very friendly and when Bruno returned he took us on a tour of the Normandy beaches. We finished at the American Memorial and cemetery. It is an inspiring and at the same time solemn piece of land overlooking Omaha beach. Omaha was considered the most difficult of the allied landings and as it was the landing site for two US Divisions it is a fitting location for the memorial. I always thought that the USA returned their war dead home for burial but discovered that next of kin were given the option in Europe of a burial site in situ or at home. There are 9,000 graves at Omaha.

In the evenings Bruno entertained us with his BBQing skills and by offering a large variety of aperitifs to finish off the evening. My favourite was the apple ice-cream with calvados as topping. Fruit and whisky ice-cream!???!!!!

If only we had 4 weeks spare to work on our French – who knows, maybe we would grow to like the “aroma” of soft French cheese?
Picture
Picture
A fairly typical memorial in a small French village.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Mark
    Julia
    Molly

    Archives

    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009

    Categories

    All
    Argentina
    Australia
    Austria
    Belgium
    Brazil
    Cambodia
    Chile
    China
    Croatia
    Czech Rep.
    Denmark
    England
    France
    Germany
    Hungary
    Ireland
    Italy
    Laos
    Lichtenstein
    Lithuania
    Luxembourg
    Mongolia
    Northern Ireland
    Peru
    Poland
    Portugal
    Prep
    Russia
    Scotland
    Singapore
    Slovakia
    Slovenia
    Spain
    Switzerland
    Thailand
    The Netherlands
    Trans Atlantic Crossing
    Trans-Atlantic Crossing
    Tunisia
    Usa
    Vietnam
    Wales

    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.