Normandy and Picardy, France. September 10-12, 2014

Along the English Channel going north and east of Le Havre we reached our destination of Etretat. Unbeknownst to me, it was a vacation destination for most of the famous impressionist painters from Cezanne to Monet and others during the 19^th C. when the movement was starting and gaining ground.

We actually started the day south of Deauville and Honfleur which seems to be something like the birthplace of the movement.  Monet’s home, Giverny, is somewhere nearby.

I had the idea that at the mouth of the Seine, where there is a nature reserve along the coastal estuary, I would find some marshes and be able to see shorebirds and water birds migrating.  So we poked around beautiful towns along the coast finding no marshes and no beach access. At Honfleur, though, we found a nature center.  Yay! I thought.  Well, there is a formal garden with statues and box hedges, a promenade along the south bank of the Seine and a tiny marsh with a few mallards.  The actual reserve is out in the water on the southern side of the shipping channel but I could not find any marsh or shore area where wildlife might touch down or nest.  Turns out that the effort to create the reserve is controversial locally too.  So—lesser black-backed gulls, herring gulls, 10 cormorants and the mallards.  2 wrens in the garden, 4 pied wagtails. Oh well…

Winding back roads trending north and east with Etretat as our destination—it is lovely country.  Though I was ignorant of its glorious past, Nancy was aware and wanted to stand on the beach and paint the famous scene that all the famous and less-famous painters had painted.  What fun and what a great town.  The paintings are of a cliff which forms one arm of the beach.  It is of white rock and has an arch through which a pointy tower of white stone is visible.  All the painters painted it and current painters all want to do so too.  For good reason—what a beautiful scene.  Now, I will see that cliff and arch in every painting and art history book—doesn’t that always happen?

Etretat has been around for a long time—the restaurant where we had lunch is a building made of half-timber framing which is the main old style of building in Normandy as far as I can tell.  Stone ground floor then timber framing filled in with something else.  The something else can be plaster, bricks or stone.  This building has very old carvings on the ends of the timbers and under the eaves.  Although it is called “The Salamandre” I only saw human-type figures.  Carved in the rock on the ground floor—near our table—was the date 1645.  It is hard to imagine wood carvings lasting that long but the place definitely looked old.  Etretat was a fishing town and maybe a pirate town too.  There was not that much explanation about either the building or the history of the town other than about the impressionists. 

Never mind.  I just love this stuff and had a grand time walking around the town and along the beach.  Turns out that the beach and cliffs are actually made of flint.  The beach is pebbly—no sand.  It is about 1 mile from cliff to cliff with no jetty or dock.  They pull the boats up on to the shore with cables and drag them down or wheel them down on a little wagon type of thing.  Not a yachting destination but other areas along the coast have rivers and good pleasure boat harbors.  But flint—I have never seen that much flint at one time.  I thought it was limestone or chalk.  The Neolithic settlers must have been in stone-heaven, with the perfect stone for tools.  There is a bit of evidence for Neolithic use of the area but I could not discover much about it. There is no evidence that the very early Paleolithic or Neanderthal hunters used the area.  As part of Normandy, it was settled by the Vikings that the King of France invited in to protect the area from other Vikings.  No doubt it was farmed and fished during the Gallo-Roman era as well.

All the area we have been wandering around in has been Normandy.  Mont Saint Michel is the western edge and the Seine Maritime just north of Etretat is about the north east.  We have spent most of our time in Normandy—delightfully so.  We had plans to get to Brittany to see the standing stones at Carnac.  Much too ambitious for us—we travel at a much slower pace.  So, we have been wandering Normandy—happily.

Normandy is apple country—cider is the drink, not wine.  This being France, much good wine is available from other parts of the country but locals make cider.  Stopping at local country restaurants, they have a house cider from their own “presse.”  Fun to try.  The main food in the western area is gallettes—crepes made from buckwheat.  As we get further east gallettes and crepes are mixed.  Seafood and fish are featured on menus and good.  Dorrado is a fish I first tried in West Africa where locals could catch it not that far off shore.  They do that here too and it is good here too.  They are small—8-10 inches or so and served whole in both places.  If it is in the Atlantic, near shore, I guess it might be along the east coast of North America but I am not aware of it.

Since we are camping, we are cooking for ourselves often.  One of the delights of most days is our stop at the first patisserie we come to.  They sell bread too so we get our bread, croissants and some kind of delight for lunch—pizza, quiche, whatever they have.  Today was salmon quiche.  It took us a while to figure it out but bread and croissants are delivered to the campgrounds also.  The little van from “George V” came tooting through our campground morning and evening.  Gifford Pinchot National Forest could learn something here.

There is much to say about camping but I will do a riff specifically on that subject in some other post.  We have had superb weather and this is a delightful way to see less populated areas of France.  Today though is the day we are actually wending our way back toward Mulheim, Germany to turn in our van next Monday.  So we are travelling for direction rather than going to a specific destination.  Thank heavens we have enough time to take the scenic roads along the coast.  After a beach morning while the light was just right for painting the cliff we have driven through one beautiful town after another with farm fields and small forests in between.  You know those post-card type pictures with little villages of pitched-roof brick farm houses—it really looks like that here.  Most villages have old churches—either Norman architecture with rounded arches or early gothic with pointed arches.  The churches mainly have quite massive square towers holding up the steeples.  You just would think there would be a few tacky buildings somewhere but there really do not seem to be any.  Some of the bigger towns like Dieppe and Abbeville have recently built houses but they fit the style of the older buildings.  I have no idea if there is some sort of law about such things or if the cultural norms are so strong that this is what people think to do.  There must be some sort of zoning since there is no sprawl—towns and villages do not leak out into the farms much.  There are areas along highways with businesses and grocery stores but the villages have small compact business areas near the center where the bus stops (and where camping cars can park.)

Since we are on our way back to Germany, we did not have a specific destination in mind nor any camp ground identified.  We have ended our day in Picardy saying good-bye to Normandy.  We found ourselves in the very small village of Cramont.  It has a church (brick, gothic) a community center (empty right now) and one business (bar, tabac and newsstand).  There is a school and quite a few houses with child’s play equipment in the yards but not that many people around.  No half-timbered buildings but some massive brick/stone farmhouses which look like the fortress-farms from after the barbarian invasions. The bar/tabac was able to sell us a package of coffee and we had a beer.  We are not in cider country anymore.  Our French is marginal but we managed a few friendly sentences. 

Our evening entertainment has been trying to read the local area newspaper: a garage mechanic from Abbeville is getting ready for a solo voyage across the Atlantic; a local woman is pleased to have been offered the headmistress job at College de Notre Dame. I have found out that the place to find birds is at the mouth of the Somme.  A whole page is devoted to the “spatules” and “heron cinder” who nest there.  Spoonbills and grey herons are more than I found at the mouth of the Seine.  Maybe next spring.