Fed up yet? Yes, didn’t think so.
We spent a considerable amount of our time inside the car, but we made sure we only went to the greatest of places. Since another considerable amount of time was spent hunting for and then consuming food, it won’t surprise you to hear that we bought a baguette at a local boulangerie and then drove about another twenty miles until we had found the perfect spot to have our little picnic. What I’m trying to point out here is the fact that we didn’t eat just about anywhere. Actually, we missed having our picnic twice because we were so selective about these places.
The one shown above was fabulous. What you see is a house towering above a tiny stone beach near a place called St.Pierre sur Port (maplink)We sat there in our street clothes and snacked on the baguette while people took dips in the rather cold Atlantic. It was quite probably one of the best places for a picnic you could ever imagine (and only if your imagination was really, really good).
After exactly 12 hours of travel, we had reached the Normandy. The first place we decided to look at was a town called Vernon. It turned out that the guide we were using didn’t mention the fact that on Sundays Vernon is a ghost town, and somehow it felt so eery that we decided to get into our car and leave.
Enter Les Andelys, the town that’s built below the castle that Richard the Lionheart used to call home (whenever he decided not to reside in England, which actually was just about most of the time he was king).
We had dinner at a fabulous little restaurant, and it was the first time I was able to show off my utter lack of polished French. Good thing I still remembered from my childhood days that pointing your finger at stuff is almost as effective as talking.
We decided to save money by taking country roads instead of the expensive French motorway and made our way through Alsace, the region in Eastern France that’s still populated by German-speaking people.
That’s why the picture above is of Le Schlucht, an interesting language mix consisting of a French article and the German word for gorge*.
That again reminds me of an entry I wrote a while ago on macaronic poetry, which still makes me weep with laughter whenever I stumble upon it. Ach, I’m so easy to please.
*The picture is of course not of the language mix, but of the landscape behind the gorge. Just in case my clumsy wording had you confused for a bit.
I’m back. The vacation was wonderful, and because it only lasted a week, I will prolong the whole experience by posting photos of the trip on here for the next few days or weeks, so you too can see how great it was.
Well, instalment number one is this very posting. The picture above is of the border between Switzerland and France. The funny thing is, it took us about two hours to cross that border (the photo was taken at around 5AM), but it took us around 12 hours to finally reach the Normandy. Goes to show that, well, the Normandy’s one far away province.
![Medienschelte.at [de]](http://stormgrass.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/medienscheltebutton.png)
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