Ride Day 9: Across Normandy to Honfleur

I am aware that there are some rumors floating around the ether that I ditched Lorie somewhere in Belgium or northern France. Maybe exchanged her for some Franco-Belique stoker. The paucity of photos on this blog are perhaps the source of the rumors. But I want to set the record straight: FAKE NEWS! All of it. And I have the photos today to prove it. 😀 

Lorie, alive and oh-so-well in Normandy. Arm? Doing OK.

Waiting for the ferry to cross the mighty Seine.

Pay little attention to the route below. After a nice evening in the tiny and lovely village of Saint-Valey-en-Caux we pushed off this morning for a ride to Honfleur, a prototypical beautiful French village. So they told us. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

The morning dawned nicely but with a brisk wind. Maybe 50 kph, gusting 70. That's pretty brisk, but fortunately it was at our backs. Kind of. 

 

Our hotel in Saint-Valery-en-Caux was adequate enough, but the best part was the seagull family on the next roof over. These two little seagull chicks were as cute as could be, and they clearly were ready to fly the coop, so to speak. Mom and Dad were less than encouraging on that point.

 

Onto today's ride. As usual, we got super lost at one point and ended up riding through a little farm village that was having some kind of huge farm tractor parade. It was super fun and everybody was living it up. We couldn't figure out what was going on, but it looked like they were going to put the parish priest on some big tractor platform and he would bless the crops. That's our interpretation. Whatever was really going on, they were having a ball!

 

Tractors, big and small

Big...

 

Did I mention that this was a holiday weekend? And that today is a holiday (pentacost, whit Lundi...go figure). (And I will editorially add that none of the tractor drivers were spending their day at the church with the blessing-priest...)

We had a glorious ride in fantastic sunshine with a cookin' tailwind. Nice. We stopped for coffee in some little village that had one open bar / cafe. Good enough for us. And then we let the wind push us down the road. 

 

 

 I had long ago decided that I did not want to ride across the Normandy Bridge across the Seine river.

 

There is no freakin' way that I would ride over that bridge. Do you agree, Theo? Better to divert 30 km over an 18% grade, I think...

 

They say that bikes can ride over it, but it would be, to coin a term, In-Seine. So I routed us around the bridge with a ferry It was super nice. But that put us on a dirt road for about 10 km. Lorie said no way, worried that I'd dump the bike and mess up her arm. Again. So I re-routed on the fly. That worked fine but we had a lump to ride over and it was 15 - 18% gradient for nearly a mile. OMG. We had to walk the final 300 m. That's the first time that has happened to us. The walk of shame. 

But we made it into Honfleur by mid-afternoon and it was absolutely jamb packed with visitors. We couldn't even push the bike through town. Earlier in the day we had met a couple of bike tourists from Paris that said that Honflueur would be overflowing with people since (a) it is a holiday weekend, and (b) it is the closest coastal community to Paris. They were right. Geez. It was amazing. We eventually worked our way through the crowd and offloaded our panniers at the hotel. 

 

 

The inner harbour, Honfleur on a holiday weekend.

Then we wandered around town. The harbour was a no-go because it was too crowded. So we hit the back streets and found a museum to visit. The promised Monet paintings were absent, on loan, but there were some very nice Boudin paintings. Well worth it. After that, we walked back through the harbour area but again were just overwhelmed by the crowds. We found a bar in a side street that had Leffe blonde beer and that was good enough.

 

Better than a crowded sidewalk.

 

Here's a suggestion: if you want to visit Honfleur, just watch some YouTube videos and do some internet snooping instead. It is a lot better than visiting this busy place in person. No doubt, it is a beautiful old village across the Seine from Le Havre, but it long ago lost its charm to the draw of the tourist payoff. Sad, in my opinion. Here are some good photos of a city that is / was, very beautiful:

We are in good spirits, despite my grumbling. Tomorrow we have another long day along the Norman coast to Bayeaux. There, we'll spend a couple of days and visit the D-Day beaches. Something I have always wanted to do.