Monday, 26 June 2017

France - Calais to Bain de Bretagne

16 – 18 June

Into the West

A disadvantage of living in Stratford upon Avon is that it takes considerably longer to get to the Channel tunnel! Not to worry, we just leave plenty of time in case of inevitable delays on the M25, in the hope that we have been over-cautious and might get an earlier shuttle, which is exactly what happened on this trip. In fact, Le Shuttle was so quiet they were operating a “free-flow” and we boarded the train an hour earlier than booked.

After a night halt at our usual site, Les Erables, we travelled down to Honfleur and were impressed by the huge Pont de Normandie over the mouth of the river Seine. We joined the throng on the aire.





Don’t leave your arrival too late if you want to stay here in the summer! The local community police were quickly on the scene, but not on our account, but because the owners of a car and caravan had thought they would also make use of the parking facility – non, non, non!
We whiled away the latter part of the afternoon and evening exploring the old port lined with colourful houses and heaving with restaurants.




We were amused to see two young chaps trundling a piano over the cobblestones. While having a meal later, we could hear piano music not too far away and assumed they had reached their destination; thankfully the piano seemed remarkably in tune!  

The area around St Catherine’s Church with its separate bell tower was very pretty; unfortunately, we were only able to peek inside the church as there was a wedding in progress.  The museum dedicated to the life of the composer Erik Satie, who was born in Honfleur, (thankfully with audio in English!) showed what a quirky character he was.

The next stop was at Bain de Bretagne, where we stayed at the lovely municipal site, and were very grateful for the shade of the trees as the temperature climbed to about 30 deg C. The facilities were clean and perfectly adequate for a short stay and the site was very peaceful, apart from some noise from the nearby railway.




From there, a last “hop” to the islands off the Atlantic coast…..

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