Friday - a Day in France

Friday

Oh, forgot to tell you, checked with people who made the tour in Plymouth and it was another case of miscommunication. The tour driver checked with the pier dispatcher and was told that the next tender would be in 30-45 minutes so they decided not to wait since the tour was already shortened due to the ship’s late arrival. What he wasn’t told was that there was a tender on the way, which was the one we were on, and we arrived about 10 minutes after they left. The tour got mixed reviews from those that we talked to but no one indicated that they thought it was great, so I guess we didn’t miss much.

OK – today is Le Havre, France. Because we don’t speak French and most of the places to visit are quite a distance from the port, we opted to take our only ship sponsored tour today and we picked Impressions of Monet, a trip to his home in Giverny, a visit to a local museum, lunch and a tour of the medieval town of Rouen France.

This day and tour were so fabulous that I don’t have enough words to describe it. The pictures will help and I’ll post them later once I have time to edit and select the best of them. We must have taken a thousand pics between us today. The weather today was great with sunshine on & off – mostly on & temps in the high 70’s- this was the first day where we didn’t need jackets, and just carried a light raincoat in case the weather changed.

Our guide, Ann Marie was a French lady who was formerly an art teacher. She was wonderful and very, very knowledgeable. It was about a 2 hour bus ride to get to the town of Giverny and during the trip, she gave us lots of info about the area, Monet and the Impressionists. When we arrived at Monet’s house, we were given an hour to tour the gardens and the house. We could have stayed there easily all day. The flowers and the river and the flowers and the water lilies and the flowers and the landscaping and the flowers and the house and the flowers – oh my – just unbelievable. Words can’t describe the beauty of the place adequately. There are not enough superlatives to begin to cover this place. Everything looks just like the Monet paintings. The house and grounds and gardens are maintained just as they were in Monet’s time. Very interesting to us was the fact that the walls inside the house are just covered in a huge collection of Japanese woodblock prints.

After leaving, very reluctantly, the house, we walked through the town of Giverny to the museum which has rotating exhibits. Along the way we passed the famous poppy fields that were in full bloom and beautiful. There was a little French girl about 6 years old, sitting on the ground with her finger paints, painting the poppies – the next Monet perhaps? At the museum, luckily for us, the current exhibit was a wonderful gathering of 30 of Monet’s works, many of which were from private collectors and not usually on display. Ann Marie’s commentary here was really wonderful and she pointed out many things that we’d have missed on our own. In addition, there were tons of photos of Monet, his family and the house and gardens throughout the time he lived there. There was also the documentation of the requests he made to the local government for permission to redirect the river to build his water gardens and many of his sketches for the gardens. It was a fascinating exhibit. A few of the photos had been blown up to lifesize and it was almost as if Monet was in the room watching everybody admire his paintings and landscaping.

Next we walked to the restaurant at the Hotel Baudy where we had lunch. This was in the actual original boarding house (later hotel) where many of the Impressionist painters stayed and congregated when they came to visit Monet. Lunch was very good once we got past the slight mix up they had with our group and a group of Japanese tourists who were also there for lunch. How could they confuse us with a Japanese group??? We had a salad, chicken in mushroom sauce and some of the best potatoes in cream sauce I’ve ever eaten and a nice apple tart with coffee for desert. Back to the bus and we went to the town of Rouen.

The town of Rouen is a medieval city with narrow streets with tall timbered and stuccoed houses of all ages going back to the 9th and 10th centuries and some younger ones built just like the old ones. It is also famous for the cathedral there, which was built and rebuilt many times on previous foundations. Monet famously painted a series of huge canvases of this cathedral at different times of the day and in differing weather to show the changes in the façade in different lighting. Many, many years ago, on my first trip to Paris in the 60’s, I saw a museum exhibit of these paintings that had been gathered from around the world to be shown together for a short time. These images showing the cathedral in the golden shades of morning, the more brownish shades of late afternoon, the blues of dusk, the differing grays of rain and winter, have always stayed with me and to finally see the actual cathedral in person was just wonderful. Again our guide was great about providing the history of the various parts of the façade and why and when they were built that way. Unfortunately on the day we were there, they were preparing for the funeral of a bishop so the cathedral was closed to visitors and we were unable to go inside. Ah well, I guess we’ll have to save that for another trip.

We did a walking tour through the city, most of which is pedestrian only. I hate to think about how the people living on the top floors of the 5 and 6 story buildings (with no elevators of course) get their groceries home. Obviously not too many fat people live here. The city was delightful with lots of old wooden houses, art work, fancy clocks, medieval city walls, shops, boutiques, flower stalls, street entertainers, open air markets etc. Rouen is also famous for being the place where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. There is a marker on the spot where they believe it happened and the ruins of the church where it occurred. A new, very modern church has been built next to the ruins of the old church and for some reason it is connected by a long roof to the open air fish market. We had some free time in Rouen, some people on the bus wanted to buy some wine and our guide recommended that they stay out of “Wine shops” and instead go to the local supermarket to get the same wines at half the price. Bob and I went to a street café and had a drink and a rest.

This was a very full, interesting, exciting day and we were exhausted when we got back on the bus to go back to the ship. The bus got delayed in a big traffic jam on the way back and we were really glad that we’d taken a ship tour. Our bus was the last one back to the ship, coming in later than the official all aboard. Everything but one gangway had been cleared from the pier, there were ship’s personnel chasing us up the gangway and pulling it in after us. We hadn’t even gotten to our cabin before the ship started pulling away from the dock. Whew – that was close. We both took tons and tons of pictures in Giverny and Rouen and it makes me happy all over again to look at them. I’ll post them soon, but it’s going to be very hard to edit them down to a reasonable number.

We rushed to get cleaned up, then to dinner because we were pretty hungry after that long day and 3 of our table mates are leaving the ship tomorrow in Dover and going on to London for a few days and we wanted to say good bye to them. Of course we exchanged emails and will be in touch with them again.

After dinner we had to go to the computer center and estimate what our bags were going to weigh in order to prepay for them on Aer Lingus. It’s a significant savings if you prepay rather than pay at the airport. That activity was a miserable pain in the butt, and with the slowness of the ships internet we managed to miss the last ship show. Oh well – our record is intact, we didn’t see a single show this trip. This activity also used up all of my prepurchased computer minutes on the ship, so no more internet for us. Next time we connect will be in Ireland. One last time to donate to the casino and then it’s off to bed. Got to our cabin and had a wonderful surprise, the little card on the bed told us that we are going to gain an hour tonite since France is an hour ahead of England. Whoopee – more sleep time!