On our way from Paris to Normandy we spent a night in a place called Evreux as a way of breaking up the trip. This is something we’ve done from time to time – we know how far we can travel in a day and like to be settled in time to get dinner at a more or less regular time. We had hoped to stop in a place called Giverny to visit Claude Monet’s house and gardens which were the inspiration for many of his most famous works, but a GPS hiccup spooked us and we pressed on using the GPS in Jean-Pierre (our Peugeot rental car).
After spending the night in Evreux, we headed for Mont-St-Michel (actually a city near it called Avaranches) with a stop in Honfleur, a beautiful seaside city.
Just before reaching Honfleur, we encountered another example of Europe’s fine bridges. Maybe they have more practice because they have more rivers to ford, but it can’t be just our imagination that by comparison Canada’s bridges are an architecturally uninspired and sadly utilitarian lot.
The town of Honfleur has a nice parking lot for visitors just outside its main core and you pass this working harbour on the way to the more touristy inner harbour.
This is the inner harbour and on this fine, sunny day, it was a real beauty.
Allister and Charlotte finding a group of small fishes to feed or observe.
We visited Honfleur on a weekend afternoon and it seemed a popular place with French visitors and, for a city this pretty, surprisingly few foreign tourists. This highly unscientific finding is based on the sampling of spoken foreign languages heard technique our family deployed in most towns we visited.
Honfleur had some lovely small shops and restaurants and on a sunny, warm weekend day, its narrow roads looked great!
This old building is Honfleur’s oldest churches and, even though this picture doesn’t show it, the story goes that Honfleur had many more tradesmen skilled in building boats than churches. If you look at the roof of the church from the inside it looks more like the inverted hull of an boat than some of the other churches and cathedrals we visited elsewhere in Europe.
Finally, as I said earlier, it was a sunny weekend and as we were headed in this direction we were passed by a large number of powerful motorcycles with French license plates. Once we reached Honfleur, based on the number of motorcycles in evidence, it became apparent that most of the motorcycles had also been bound for Honfleur.
