Monday, June 29

I woke up at 1:11 to piss. I didn’t fall back asleep for nearly four hours. Instead of a good night’s sleep, I had two 2-hour naps. This, after 2 minutes the night before.

When we went down for breakfast, we saw that the boat right in front of the hotel was the center of quite a bit of attention. About three hours earlier, there was a fire in the kitchen. The fire was out, but there were still eleven or twelve emergency vehicles on the scene. The street in front of the hotel was closed, and it’s the main route into town.

Later, we learned that there were about 120 guests on the boat. These boats run tours up the Seine to Paris. There were no injuries, but everyone’s vacations were ruined. This is high tourist season in Honfleur, and I’m sure they had difficulty finding accommodations with all the hotels booked up. That fire ruined the vacations of those 120 people.

We get breakfast in the hotel every morning, in a reserved dining room. The breakfast buffet was pretty good. Scrambled eggs, poached eggs, sausage, bacon, cereal, oatmeal, breads, pastries, crepes, cheeses, cold cuts, fruit, and more. I like crispy bacon, and here it was not at all crispy.

Genae was a bit behind me getting breakfast. While I was eating, she was doing her hair. She brought a curling iron with her, but it didn’t like French electricity and melted. Our adapters only adapt the plugs – not the voltage. If converting a curling iron into a Dali-esque sculpture is the worst thing that happens to us, this trip will be a success.

After breakfast, we had a guided walking tour of old-town Honfleur. One of the first things we learned was the population and the number of annual visitors. Those were both very close to the numbers for Estes Park, but Honfleur entertains that many tourists without being the gateway to a large national park.

Honfleur sits on the south side of the Seine estuary. It’s an historic village and port, but it hasn’t been important for ages, what with Le Havre, France’s fourth busiest port, just to the north.

Old town Honfleur struck me as a small-town version of old-town Brussels – smaller, less ornate buildings on narrower streets. Honfleur is a port, though, so an inner harbor substitutes for the big square. The port serves two fishing boats, some day-trip boats, and the river tour boats parked in front of our hotel.

Our tour took us to the Church of St. Catherine, a wooden structure built in the 15th Century. It was doubled in size at one point. Notably, because of the risk of lightning, the bell tower, also made of wood, was across the street. That way, if the belfry took a lightning strike, the church wouldn’t burn. The steeple features a lightning rod in the form of a cat with its tail up.

We stumbled upon a caramel shop, where we bought over 9€ of caramels – your basic caramel flavor, plus strawberry-vanilla, raspberry, blueberry, coffee, licorice, apple, and maybe a dozen more.

For lunch, we asked Rainer if the pizza place a couple of doors down from the hotel was any good. He shook his head and directed us to a place two blocks the other way. He was disappointed that we were looking for Italian food in France, but we’ll get enough French food during the week, no doubt. I had pizza a couple of times in Belgium; why not have it here? I had the four cheese, which was tasty, if difficult to eat. Here, like in Belgium, they don’t slice your pizza, but give you a steak knife and a fork. I had a nice local beer, so the meal was a success.

After lunch, we set off towards the ocean. This led us past the locks between the basins and the inner harbor of Honfluer and the estuary, and to the Jardin des Personnalités (Garden of Personalities). It’s a beautiful park that commemorates many of the notable figures in Honfleur’s past – Erik Satie (pianist and composer), Claude Monet (painter and founder of Impressionism), Eugène Boudin (painter), Charles Baudelaire (poet), Samuel de Champlain (explorer), and a dozen others. Not all the figures were from Honfleur (Monet was from Le Havre), and not all of them lived in Honfleur during their lives. But Honfleur was in some way important to them, and they are important to Honfleur.

In the garden, each personality was represented by a bust in a little themed garden-within-a-garden. You move down a path with these little scenarios on both sides, with Monet’s at the end, on a little peninsula in a large pond full of lilies, large goldfish, and ducks. I thought this was particularly apt, and yet, somehow, managed not to get a photo.

Done with the garden, we walked along the seawall to its end, where we arrived at the beach. We didn’t venture far down the beach. The tide was out. Most people were walking on the dry sand, some were digging in the wet sand for clams, or mussels, or whatever they were looking for, and one was packing up his kayak on a little trailer he pulled behind him for the walk to the parking lot. Nobody was swimming – that was prohibited, at least where we were.

On the way back to town, we stopped for a few minutes on a shady park bench to relax. This was serendipitous – after a few minutes, two boats approached the lock. It was hard to tell until they were in the lock that the ocean was a couple of feet higher than the harbor. This is the first time I’ve watched a lock operate. I was entertained, but I’m not so sure about Genae.

On the way back to the hotel, we made a slight detour to the Ferris wheel. It’s not a thrill ride, but it’s big enough to give us a nice view of the town and the Pont de Normandie, the large cable-stayed bridge that spans the Seine.

At 5:30, back at the hotel, we sat in our breakfast room for a lecture about the French Resistance during the war. This was given by the same gal who gave us our tour of Old Town. I’ve read quite a bit about the war and was not expecting to learn much, but it was an interesting and informative talk. In the wrap-up, she told us the story of her grandfather, who was arrested and sent to a camp in Ukraine from which he escaped and returned home before the war ended. He had been arrested more than once, escaped more than once, and undergone torture. For his troubles, the French government awarded him a pension equivalent to about 100€ a year. Thank you for your service!

Dinner was another group affair. Genae had low expectations, but was treated very well. The salad was salmon – a bit like tuna salad, with toast and greens. When Genae said she didn’t want it, Rainer had them bring her a garden salad. This restaurant was known for its fish, so, again, Genae was not expecting to enjoy it. When the servers brought out our plates, I first thought it was salmon steak. Instead, it was ham steak with potatoes. Very tasty. Dessert was an apple pastry. Delicious. (This area is known for its apples. More on that later.) Three of our group didn’t make it to dinner. Rainer asked the servers to bring out three more desserts, one of which Genae and I split. Yes, I’m way off my diet, but I’m enjoying it.