Transfer to Bayeux

Today was primarily scheduled to be a transit day, which features (a) packing everything into our cases, (b) checking out, (c) driving someplace else, finding the hotel and the parking, (d) unpacking and settling into a new room. In this case, Marian had also planned four short stops along the way.

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First up, half an hour out of Rouen, was the Abbaye de Jumiège, a ruined abbey that Victor Hugo thought was the most beautiful ruin in France. It was still a functional and influential abbey until the 1790s when the French Revolution occurred. The Revolution was anti-clerical as well as anti-monarchist, and the Republicans closed and destroyed this along with many other abbeys. So it hadn't been a ruin even a century when Hugo saw it.

Anyway, it's ruined.

For anything but pictures, that is.

Next, a few Ks down the road, was the Pont de Brotonne, a fairly new bridge over the Seine, a very nice cable-stayed bridge (such as the new Bay Bridge will be).

In Caudebec-en-Caux, the town at the foot of this bridge is a notable church.

The main attraction is that its West front has 330 little figures of people of all walks of life from the time, the 15th century.

Some of those within reach of the ground are broken. Protestant Iconoclasts destroyed all the larger saint's images but only poked at the little ones. (Or maybe figures of ordinary people were politically acceptable?) The event is memorialized in an inscription on the North wall,

"La Desolation de cette église fut le 12ieme jour de mai 1562"—The despoiling of the church was done the 12th of May 1562.

We paused for lunch in what the guidebook said was attractive riverside town, but nothing looked too cute in gray light, so on. Looked at some of the other very large bridges that span the Seine.

Brightest thing around, a field of rapeseed, future canola oil.

These fields of rapeseed, huge blocks of vivid yellow on the green landscape, are the only visible agriculture at this time of year.

From there an hour on the motorway (partly toll, partly free) brought us around Caen to Bayeux, which is quite small, a big village rather than a medium town like Rouen. More about it later.

Parc Moutiers & Étretat

The plan for today was to hit two pretty places on the coast North of Rouen: a garden at Parc des Moutiers (day moo tea yay), and further along Étretat (et ruh tah), a small resort town featuring dramatic cliffs. Here's the general route.

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Parc des Moutiers

A banker, Guillaume Mallet, in 1898 bought a large area of coastal land. He had a house built by the very young Edwin Lutyens, and set about making the 30-acre site beautiful. Here's a Wikipedia article about the place. Still owned by the descendants of Mallet, it is a lovely place to wander. There are formal gardens around the house; then the property slopes down as, seemingly, a pleasant woodland, to the sea. But the pleasant casual woodland is actually a carefully chosen variety of plants that are not at all native to the chalk hills of the coast.

We followed the nicely documented walking route for the better part of two hours, looking and snapping. One of the first things that impressed us was some Pieris plants that were small trees. We have a Pieris in our front yard but not like this.

Primo pieris.

The park has a lot of rhododendrons of different kinds, but we were a week or so too early (or the cold spring has held them back).

In another week, pow!

In a carefully designed marshy place, the triffids were growing.

There were azaleas and camelias.

And quite a few other things, all in all a very pleasant garden ramble.

Étretat

Leaving Parc des Moutriers we followed small roads along the coast through a succession of little resort villages. By now hungry and thirsty we started looking for a boulangerie or store, and couldn't find such. Then in a tiny square in a tiny village we saw a boulangerie that seemed to be closed, in fact had a sign "fermé le Lundi" (closed Monday) but in fact, was open, so we bought a baguette from an actual jolly baker. Next door a small store also looked dark but in fact was open so we could get cheese and bananas.

Drove a little further looking for a place to park and eat, and stumbled on a WWII monument: the battle of Veule des Roses, a holding action during the German invasion of 1940 that allowed a few hundred British troops to get off to a ship.

In the distance, the cliffs that characterize this coast.

The busy resort town of Étretat sits in a stream valley that makes a gap in the solid cliff line, and a beach. On the West, the cliff runs out to make an arch and a "needle."

The boats are kids in a one-design sailing race.

On the East side, the cliff is climbed by a stairway.

Marian took this as a challenge.

We climbed the whole thing.

Back down on the beach we celebrated with crêpes.

Crêpe au sucre et crêpe au caramel.

Heading back to Rouen, the GPS guided us, for no apparent reason, onto smaller and narrower roads, ignoring the main routes.

What was it, so to speak, thinking?

We finally shut it off when we saw we were close to a freeway, and jumped on it.

Tomorrow: on to Bayeux!

Walking Around Rouen

Rouen has lots of colorful buildings and we really wanted sun to make them pop. The weather didn't cooperate so we had to see them in somewhat gloomy conditions. We set out to see what we could.

The most noticeable feature of this town is the large number of wonky old half-timbered buildings. Some towns in England have a few; some towns in Germany have a few; Rouen has streets and streets of them. Here are just a couple of the wonkiest.

First up, because it's just down the block from our hotel, was the Rouen cathedral. Here is the main (West) facade.

The stonework over the North door is quite striking.

Inside, there are the usual soaring pillars, and a small congregation hearing mass.

and this lovely staircase.

Next stop was Le Gros Horloge (The Great Clock), a civic emblem since the 1500s. It still keeps time with its one hand.

Above the dial is a half-black, half-silver ball that shows the phase of the moon (full at the time of this shot).

Underneath the dial is a sector that shows the day of the week as a symbolic graphic.

This is Saturday's image. It will change at noon to Sunday.

You can tour the interior with an audio guide. We did that, pausing along the way to look down the street at the cathedral.

And ending up atop the tower next to the clock for views like this one.

Rouen is where Joan of Arc was martyred. Nearby in the 1970s they built an extremely modern church. Here's an overview of it.

This marks the spot where she was burned at the stake.

We also visited another massive church, Saint Ouen. Here's its back end with buttresses.

St. Ouen has a west window that is almost psychedelic in its swirlyness.

Imagine making this out of stone?

For more wonky buildings, interior shots of the Cathedral and St. Ouen, views from the top of the clock tower, more of the Joan of Arc church and who knows what else, take a look at the Rouen Gallery. It's a new gallery with just the pics from the past two days in it, so, not quite as overwhelming as the Paris gallery became.

Monet Day

Marian planned 3 things to do in or out of Rouen; the question was, in what order. Two need at least some sun and today's forecast was for clouds, so: the drive to Giverny it had to be.

Claude Monet gave Impressionism its name with his "Impression, Sunrise." Giverny is the village where he lived the latter half of his life and where he painted his best-known works, the series of "water lilies." We saw the last and largest works of this series at The Orangerie ("No-unfurl day", 4/26). Today we would see the pond he was looking at while painting them.

We doodled down red roads instead of getting onto the parallel A13 motorway.

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In the parking lot we snapped a shot of Clio.

Impression, Voiture Avec Iris.

Before going in we grabbed lunch from a place selling take-away food. This is a French notion of a pre-packed take-away tomato and mozzarella salad.

Tres jolie, tres bon.

The village has pretty well made itself over into "Monet Land" with a museum, numerous cafés, etc. But the main attraction is the house and especially, the gardens.

The pond is across a road, accessed via a tunnel.

A spot of sun wandered by and gave an intro to the garden.

There were chickens.

Les poulets de Monet

There was Monet's home, which we didn't enter.

And there were flowers. Lots and lots of flowers. We indulged ourselves in shooting flowers.

"No, over here, it's better from this angle!"

"OK, if you say so..."

We finally reached the pond. Monet always painted the water as blue, reflecting a summer sky. Unfortunately the sky was solid gray today, so the pond was gray. We tried.

And tried.

We took a short video, panning across the pond.

During the video you can hear loud bird-like noises. It turned out these were being made by frogs! And we caught one at work. Keep clicking the replay button to see his little cheeks pop.

Marian posed on one of the bridges.

And we asked a nice man from Minnesota who was clearly a photographer to take our picture.

And we shot some more flowers.

That was about it for Giverny, but it was a most satisfying afternoon. Now we headed back by even smaller roads.

We took a look at Château Gâillard, built by Richard Lionheart to control traffic on the Seine. (Point C in the map above.)

Further up, we found a view area looking over a loop of the Seine at a place called Thuit. Now, if you click this image, you will get a huge panorama from there. Centered in the far distance, halfway up the hillside above the river is Richard Lionheart's château.

Back in Rouen, we ate supper at a restaurant that specializes in duck. Duck is what one must eat in Rouen, it seems. We had a good supper from the menu prix fixe á €22: Salad with smoked duck and duck gizzards; duck breast with pasta; and for a dessert a rice pudding with warm caramel sauce on the bottom and whipped cream on the top.

Transit to Rouen

No pictures!

By 9:30 we had packed and tidied the apartment. And at 10:30 were waiting outside for our cab, which came pretty much on time. The taximeter starts at €12.20 but then goes up quite slowly, so the charge to cross the city was €25.

There were no problems catching the train to Rouen which pulled out on time and whizzed along between its several stops at a good clip, 80mph or more.

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In Rouen station we had a bit of trouble locating the rental car office, but only because it was closed from 12-2 for lunch! It was just 2 when we arrived and they turned on the lights and unlocked shortly after. The young lady clerk's English was better than our French, fortunately, and we were soon equipped with the keys to a Renault Clio. So if we refer to "Clio" in coming days, it's our dark-gray four-door hatchback we mean. Clio is a diesel with a five-speed.

Now ensued something of a comedy as we attempted to reach our hotel in central Rouen from the station, 1.4 km away.

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Looks pretty simple, yes? Well, no, because, (A) the names of streets are on little 18-inch square plaques on walls of the corner houses, so driving along in traffic you can't easily spot your turn, and (2) the street into which Google wants you to make a left is narrow and quickly turns into a pedestrian-only zone about by that little kink. So if we'd made the turn it wouldn't have worked, but because we didn't we were somewhat lost.

Technology to the rescue, sort of. Pulled the GPS we borrowed from Jean and Bill out of the suitcase and fired it up. Gave it the destination. Started following its directions only to get in more difficulties with one-way or transit-only streets. "Recalculating" became the watchword. Finally, "Turn Left! and your destination is on the right."

Nunh-unh, turning left brought us to a stop facing a "Voie Pietons" sign (pedestrian way), so we now were blocking a sidewalk with pietons walking around us while we tried to back out into traffic.

Parked the car in a public garage 4 blocks away (across from the "Church of St Ouen" on the above map) and walked in. It had taken 1.5 hours to cover 1.4 kilometers. But like true flaneurs we both kept our cool throughout.

The hotel had advertised itself as having parking. But turns out, the parking is in fact that same underground garage that we had by chance used. "Parking" meant, "you're welcome to use the municipal garage four blocks away." Don't mean to grump; the staff is very charming and helpful. But really.

Went out for supper on a square which was the site of the execution of Joan of Arc. Excellent meal from the prix fixe menu at €17. Rain started while we ate and we walked back on wet cobbles past blocks of half-timbered buildings. This is an old, old town that will be fun to explore over the next few days.