Vacation in Normandy - Sat

This was the view out our window when we woke up Saturday morning.

I was up before everyone else, so I headed outside to take a few pictures of Belle Isle, the hotel we were staying at.

After that, we headed back into Pont Audemer to get some breakfast. We could not find a single place that served any kind of breakfast, so we went to the bar we had lunch in the other day. That's another annoying thing about France, no one eats breakfast. For them, it's a croissant and a tiny tiny coffee. Beth thinks they have such tiny drinks due to the lack of public bathrooms. I think she has something there. Oh ya, and people start drinking with the sun. I never mentioned it before cause it didn't seem relevant, but sitting in a bar for breakfast and seeing how many people came in to have a morning beer or morning wine really brought it to mind.

We decided not to head up by Caen because we didn't really want to mess with driving in France without a GPS. The roadsigns were not easy to find or keep track of and it could have been a real nightmare.

Instead, we made for Honfleur and took the scenic route that the hotel lady suggested.

It did not disappoint!

After our ordeal the day before, we didn't want to mess with stopping too much because getting lost was not an appealing option. We did stop a few times though to get some pictures of the scenic landscape we were driving through. The few pictures we got do not do it justice!

We arrived in Honfleur with no problems, found a place to park and wandered through the bizarre to look for some Christmas presents for people. Ben was a little hungry, so he wasn't tolerating it too well. Instead, I took him across the street and let him chuck rocks in a little water hole we found.

After Beth got through shopping, we decided to stop for lunch. There were a lot of options.

As usual, we made our decision based on if the restaurant had a child's menu and what the options were. After that, I looked for what had the most adult options. I wanted some tasty French food.

I got it. Big time.

We got in and ordered. Ben had the child's plate...slices of ham and french fries. Beth got a Beth plate...noodles with some cheese on it, very bland. I got the whatthecrud is that plate...half a crab, escargot, prawns, shrimp. Mmmmm.

Well, in America, mmmmm. In France, mmmwhat!! Everything still has it's head on! And it's cold. And there's no butter to dip the stuff in, there's mayo.

I made a mess. It looked like someone walked through the ocean section of a pet shop with a lawn mower. Two summers ago I used to know how to disect a crab and get the meat. I might have been able to do it again, but half a crab really threw me off. I had no idea where the meat was on the body. Instead, I just made due with the scrawny legs and pincher and pulled as much cold meat out as I could.

Ben also had some crab.

Beth ate a snail. (She wanted me to bold it and make it pink so you wouldn't miss that part)

I switched between crab legs, snail, prawns and shrimp. Heads flew. Legs were ripped from their carapace. Claws cracked. It was a massacre.

I piled the remains in a bucket and continued with my rampage.

Ben, finished with his ham fries, noticed a "crab" in my remains. It was the upper half of a prawn (when you eat a prawn, you take off the upper part and take the legs off the body and eat that meat. the upper part is then tossed in the bucket.) Ben picked it up, entrails dangling, and started playing with it. He started walking it across the table and had it grab a noodle of Beth's plate with his pincer and it said, "Ooo I'm hungry."

So naturally, Ben stuffed the noodle into the chest cavity of the prawn.

I'm sure it's probably in poor taste in France to play with your food, and stuff noodles up the eviscerated remains of your crustacean, but Beth and I were laughing so hard. I could barely chew my snail.

Of course, as usual, Ben's dessert took forever to get to us, so Beth and Ben went to look at the bay while I waited for his dessert and then waited for the bill.

After I met up with them, we headed around town to see what else there was to see. Some beautiful buildings, which is enough, but not much else. We saw a couple of interesting shops and took a look, but nothing worth buying really. At this point it started raining off and on.

We headed back to the car and drove till we found the beach (Honfleur is located on the English channel, more or less).

The beach was interesting. The first thing you notice when walking out from the tunnel that leads from the parking lot are the signs that say mortal danger, do not swim here. Looking at the map, it looks like Honfleur is somewhat near a river mouth and it looks as though there's a major port somewhere around there. So there's some sort of tidal wall with a gap in it and the undertow could suck you out pretty quickly I gather. Luckily, it was freezing, so we weren't really tempted to swim. Ben had a great time picking up shells however and Beth put a bunch in her coat pocket to take back to the hotel.

After that, we headed back to the car, but not before Ben ran back and forth in the tunnel pretending he was a train many, many times.

We went back to Pont Audemer the same way we came, but this time we stopped in Conteville to take a closer look at a quaint French village in Normandy. We looked at the church and saw the war memorial (each village in France has a war memorial that lists all the men from that village that were killed in...WWII I think. I'm not certain though, this is information I got from Beth who was trying to remember what she was told back in high school when she visited France.) We saw memorials in other towns as well, Pont Audemer and Honfleur, but I didn't get pictures of them.

We walked through Conteville and decided to take a look at their cemetery, but it started to rain. We walked by some geese that honked and hissed at us (weird geese with orange beaks), and by some sheep that started to book it into their pen to get out of the rain. I guess they didn't want to shrink. By this point it was really coming down. The cemetery was just past the sheep, so I snapped a couple quick shots, put my camera under my coat, and ran back to the car.

We stopped at one more church on the way home because I thought it would make a cool picture. It sort of did, but I think it looked better from the road.

Got back to the hotel, changed, rested and then headed out to dinner. This time, at a different pizza place (there are 5 pizza places, maybe more in that town. I don't recall seeing a single normal restaurant). This time we got a pizza with chicken, curry, potatoes and cheese, kids pizza (ham and cheese. Ham is on and in everything in France. Yet in all our travels, I have yet to see a single pig. suspicious.) for Ben and ravioli with 3 cheeses and some meat.

The pizza turned out to be bland, like no taste, it's only saving grace was that it was warm. The ravioli had a strong taste of a certain cheese, we just couldn't place which kind. It was ok, but you could only taste that cheese, so it didn't make it past the ok mark. Ben's meal turned out to be the tastiest, and because he wanted to act like a two year old, not just a little bit either, he ended up not eating, so Beth ate most of it.

We got back to the hotel and crashed. We didn't get lost and we found some beautiful French countryside! A very good day!

Except, I have more pictures, so now I have to type something. Therefore, I'll take this opportunity to let you know I'm done for the night (it's 10:43, this one took me an hour and a half), but I'll get the next one up tomorrow!