Our own Tour de France

Trip Start May 01, 2008
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Trip End Jun 24, 2009


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Where I stayed
Le Brecy St.Martin de Boscherville
(Giverny hotels)

Flag of France  , Normandy,
Friday, May 9, 2008

We flew in to Paris and picked up a little Citroen C3 and headed straight off to Giverny, Monet's Garden where the famed "Waterlily" paintings are from.  Unfortunately we did not know it was Pentecost which this year coincided with a celebration for Joan of Arc, AND I think all of Paris had decided to hit the road and head to Giverny.  We are so lucky we live in an underpopulated country!!! On the positive side, the snail pace traffic gave us plenty of time to get used to driving on the wrong side of the road! When we finally arrived at Giverny we had to stand in a queue over an hour to get into the garden.  Lucky I have a patient partner! Anyway, the garden was worth it!  The irises were a mass of different colours, and although the water lilies were not in flower, the magnificent wisteria, and the stunning Japanese Cherry trees and willows dripping into the lake surrounded by a profusion of rhododendrons, azaleas, and spring blooms made up for it. There is a list of the plants here and some lovely photos in the following link.
 http://giverny.org/gardens/fcm/visitgb.htm 
After drinking in the delights of this wonderful garden (and taking one or two photos) we drove on to the quaint village of St.Martin de Boscherville near Rouen where we had booked in at a B&B in a magnificent 17th mansion (Le Brecy) which was obviously the manor house of a distant era, and had been in the family for hundreds of years.  http://home.tele2.fr/lebrecy/english.htm
It is a sprawling property and must take some upkeep but it is in what we have found to be a beautiful part of Normandy. This is the area of William the Conquerer who had a fondness for Rouen and some of the nobles in the area. His name and history are splashed all over the place throughout Normandy, and the Bayeux Tapestry explains the events leading up to the 1066 Norman invasion of England as well as the events of the invasion itself. While we were there another tapestry was on display.  This one was much newer and made in Zeeland (Holland) and it is purported to be the longest in the world. (125.62 metres).The Bayeux is 70metres long.
  
The Bayeux tapestry has to be seen in the context of the time in which it was made and from that point of view it is a marvellous exposition of what life was like in those dim distant 11th century days and how the locals dressed and behaved. The tapestry viewing area is in a dark room and very wellorganised and leads on to an excellent museum which reinforced the very differing facts of life for the royalty and locals back then. It was a hard life indeed and when William arrived in England after the Battle of Hastings he couldn't pay his 7,000 troops so they did the usual soldierly thing and pillaged (and no doubt raped too). Being a woman in those days was no fun!  http://hastings1066.com/ 
From Bayeux we passed through the delightfully named Villedieu les Poeles - literally The Village of God the Frying Pans, a charming place which we would have liked to stay in but was unfortunately booked out and headed to Vire where we met a delightful French couple who had spent two months in Brisbane in 2003.
 Next to Mont St Michel, the amazing cathedral built on an island mountain in the sea. It is an awe-inspiring sight from the distance and the first question one asks is how on earth did they manage to get the rock in the first place given the tides and quicksand, and secondly how did they manage to haul the blocks to such a great height with primitive equipment to build the many facets of the island's constructions which include the religious buildings as well as shops and restaurants at the bottom of the mount. The Archangel Gabriel sits atop the spire of the cathedral and was dropped into place by a helicopter according to an excellent scale demonstration of the state of the buildings on the island since the 10th century. We paid to go into the cathedral and its many ramifying buildings - the cloisters, reflectorium, ossary, scriptorium, etc. - and were amazed at the labyrinthine extent of the construction. There must have been some challenging engineering aspects to building on top of a domed rock. We were astonished to see a huge poster of Uluru in pride of place on the way up. Made me feel quite nostalgic!
This would make an excellent place to film a mystery with religious overtones. The views from the top were worth the climb and with the tide out it was easy to see how folk had been trapped by a rapidly incoming tide, especially since there is quicksand in the estuary too. Apparently some of Harold's troops suffered this fate in and around 1066 when he invaded northern France.
 
We drove down along the coastal road to St Malo and across to Dinard, St.Brieuc which is built on both sides of a gorge where the sea enters and has steep descents to the canal type area where there are many yachts moored underneath a huge double viaduct spanning the gorge area, and finally stopping at Yffiniac. The tides in this area are enormous, anything from 6 to 9 metres and we found the amazing sight of numerous yachts lolling on their side deserted by the tide.
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