Friday, July 3

We were back on the bus at eight this morning for our day’s travels.

First on the itinerary was the Caen Peace Memorial. As the name suggests, it’s located in the town of Caen. The town was extensively damaged during the Normandy campaign. About 35% was destroyed in combat (and more damaged), but some guidebooks give the figure as 70%. Having your city destroyed is a golden opportunity for urban renewal, so many damaged buildings were destroyed rather than repaired, and some undamaged buildings were torn down, as well.

I have issues with the rest of the name, Caen Peace Memorial. It’s a war museum. It’s a very nice war museum, which presents its material clearly and effectively. Exhibits are multimedia- artifacts, text, and videos. The exhibits are on the floor below the entry, reached on a wide spiral. As we descend, we are shown Hitler’s rise. The wall starts white, but as you descend, it turns light gray, then dark gray, and the texture goes from smooth to rough. Dark, rough times are ahead, no doubt. For the most part, it’s about the Normandy campaign. One large room is dedicated to the Holocaust. Another room covers the Pacific.

The museum is built on top of a large command bunker built by the Germans. General Wilhelm Richter’s headquarters staff (716th Infantry Division) directed operations from here during the campaign, occupying the bunker from June 5 to June 23. I was a bit disappointed – there’s very little of the bunker visible. Visitors navigate through what was a central corridor, but the passage is modern and comfortable, with several exhibits but no feeling that we’re in a bunker.

Our next stop was Les Vergers de Ducy. The estate is a large apple orchard that produces organic apple juice, hard ciders, pommeau, and calvados. After we learned a bit about how these products are made (and what they all are), we had a nice buffet-style lunch of chicken, potato salad, beets, carrots, a variety of local cheeses, with a tasty rice pudding for dessert. We also sampled all their products as well as a couple of jellies.

From there, we headed to Bayeux for a visit to the cathedral. Our guide was a wealth of information about the place – too much to retain it all. It’s of the same era as the cathedral I visited in Brussels. It was nice to have somebody telling me what I was looking at.

Construction began in the 11th century by William the Conqueror’s brother, who was made bishop at the age of 15. In the following centuries, it was expanded. Our guide explained many of the frescoes and friezes and stained glass. Each tells a story to the illiterate congregation, including the Last Supper to the resurrection in one fresco, to the assassination of Beckett in another. She kept calling them “comic strips”, which gets the point across, but there’s not a lot of comic content in these stories. Also, if you try to read them left-to-right, top-to-bottom, you’ll get the story backwards: most are read from the bottom up and alternate between left-right and right-left.

I think our visit there would have included a look at the Bayeux Tapestry if it had been on-site. It’s currently making its way to London for display in the British Museum. Our guide told us its story as well, while noting that it’s an embroidery, not a tapestry. Some wags, knowing the history of the British Museum, suggested the French might want to verify that the original was returned and not a copy.

Before returning to Honfleur, we had some time to wander through Bayeux. It’s a bit congested right now, as the town is hosting its annual Medieval Festival. We managed to find a patisserie, where we indulged in a treat called a Mont Blanc. It was decadent. If I lived in France, I’d balloon up to 400 pounds and die of diabetes. I find these little gems almost irresistible.

Thursday, July 2

Today, we went to Mont-Saint-Michel. We left the hotel at 7:30 am and didn’t return until 6:00 pm, which gave us four hours there. This is the farthest we’ll go from Honfleur on this tour. I noticed today that the Prime Meridian is about 30km west of Honfleur. Crossing the Prime Meridian just doesn’t have the same cachet as crossing the equator.

Mont-Saint-Michel is a bit overwhelming. Our guide did an excellent job of giving us the history of the place, but it’s like drinking from a firehose. I’ve retained only a small percentage of it. Trying to pay attention to her while looking at everything, trying to see as much as I can, is a recipe for overload.

The place is so widely known, I think everyone has a mental picture of it. It’s on a small, rocky island just offshore. The tide here is extreme. Our guide said nine meters; Wikipedia says fourteen. For most of a thousand years, you needed a boat to reach it at high tide but could walk there over the mud flats at low tide. Beware the quicksand, though! People are not allowed out on the mudflats without a guide, and children are taught how to spot quicksand.

All the stone for all the structures on the island came from other islands. Imagine, a thousand years ago, quarrying rock on that island, loading it on a boat, then carrying it to the top of this island to build the abbey. There are similar islands nearby, but I wonder if there was once one more island than there is today.

For a while, Mont-Saint-Michel was accessible by a causeway. That was recently removed and replaced by a bridge. The causeway interfered with the flow of water and was creating problems. We arrived not much after high tide, and by the time we left, the water was quite distant from the island. I would have loved to be able to walk on the mud flats.

Our guide told us France is the most visited nation in the world and that the Eiffel Tower is the most visited attraction in France and that Mont-Saint-Michel is the second most. [She was close. France is the most visited nation, but Disneyland Paris is the most visited attraction. The Eiffel Tower is 3rd, and Mont-Saint-Michel is 17th.] We had a long wait for a shuttle bus to take us from the parking lot to the island. Once there, we were swept through the place by the enormous crowd, ascending ramps and climbing stairs, past restaurants and gift shops as you climb.

Once in the abbey, you follow a single route through the enormous, labyrinthine structure, finally exiting through the gift shop (of course!). I can’t even come up with an estimate of how many people were there. I’m generally annoyed by big crowds. The whole island was crawling with people, but you could never see very many of them at the same time.

The place is an architectural and engineering marvel. Begun in the tenth century, before f=ma was a thing, before calculus was dreamt up, when Material Studies wasn’t a science but just trial and error applied over centuries. The oldest structure is at the top: it’s built from the top down!

It has the third-oldest Gothic arch in existence. Luckily, it was spared destruction in World War II. It was a tourist attraction for German soldiers, but off-limits to Allied soldiers except for a handful of American officers. Hemingway was here in 1944 and is said to have drunk all the alcohol in the place.

After the tour, we had time to visit the shops and grab a bite to eat. I had a crepe with egg, cheese, and “chorizo”. This is one of those many cultural differences, much like my experience with “BBQ burgers” in Belgium last year. The chorizo turned out to be more like pepperoni. The cheese was something like Swiss, the egg was sunny-side up, and the crepe wasn’t rolled up but had the edges folded over, making it square. I accompanied this with a (Belgian) beer. It was quite tasty.

Side note here. We looked for snacks at a small grocery store a couple of days ago. I spotted a jar of “BBQ sauce,” which looked to be the same stuff I experienced in Belgium. At Omaha Beach, I saw a place that claimed to have “authentic BBQ”. I was tempted to go inside to get the true story, but we didn’t have time. I’d be surprised to find anything like authentic BBQ sauce on this continent. No worries: I didn’t come here to have BBQ.

Wednesday, July 1

Another early day, today we boarded our bus at 8:00 for a trip to the village of Entretat, which lies about 50km north of Honfleur. This is a drive through rural France, avoiding the A roads (similar to US interstates). We begin, though, with a trip across the Pont du Normandie, which was the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world when it was constructed. It spans the Seine River near its mouth in the Atlantic.

Entretat is a scenic little village situated in a crease in the cliffs and bluffs that overlook the coast. Much like Arromanches, which we visited yesterday, it was largely untouched by the war. That doesn’t mean the buildings there are ancient – it has been subjected to large floods over the years. Still, many structures are a couple of centuries old. Some of them, though, are called “true fakes”. This describes some of the oldest buildings, which were built elsewhere, dismantled, shipped to Entretat, and reassembled here. They are truly old, but are fake because they’re not original to Entretat.

At the edge of the town, we disembarked from the bus and climbed onto a wheeled train that took us up to the heights to the east. We are here to see the view, a monument, and a church, but there are dairy cows here, and somebody started asking the guide questions about them. So we all walked up to the fence and learned about Normandy dairy cows. The guide said it was the first time anybody paid so much attention to the cows.

A few yards away from the cows, we find the Monument “L’Oiseau Blanc” – Nungesser et Coli. Charles Nungesser and François Coli were French World War I aces. In 1927, they attempted to be the first to fly non-stop from Paris to New York City. They disappeared not long after crossing the coast here. The monument consists of a concrete platform in the shape of an airplane, along with a triangular spire reaching westward.

Alongside the monument is the Cappelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Garde. This church is closed except for one day a year. It has a few interesting architectural details, including fish-head-shaped ornaments on the roof rafters. Both of these overlook the village and the limestone cliffs to the west. There’s a footpath from here down to the beach, which I’d have loved to take, but it was not on the cards.

After the train ride back down the hill, we walked through the streets to the waterfront. The buildings fronting the beach are all new since the Second World War. When the occupation began, the Germans demolished all the buildings along the beach and built fortifications, which are still in existence, including machine gun bunkers and anti-tank walls. France’s northern coast is lined with derelict bunkers and gun emplacements and anti-tank walls. They have no utility. They’re ugly. And they’re too big to economically demolish.

Naturally, I had to walk on the beach. It was blustery, not exactly beach weather. I was happy we brought our jackets. A guy in surfing pants and a hi-vis t-shirt went out into the water. Brrr.

The beach here is stone, inch or inch-and-a-half. This is what Omaha Beach was on D-Day. Today, Omaha Beach is sand, not a stone to be found. In the weeks after D-Day, the Allies used all the stone on Omaha Beach to make roads. If your military is going to fundamentally change the landscape, I think it’s better to use their beaches to build roads than to build indestructible, ugly, brutalist sculpture.

We retraced our steps through Entretat and embarked on the bus for our next stop: Chateau du Bec. I found the place fascinating. A fellow named Jeremy purchased it only three weeks ago. He had worked with the previous owner for several months, so he was quite familiar with the buildings, grounds, and operations.

The 10th-century chateau is, unusually, situated in a valley rather than on top of a hill. Tactically, it is critical to hold the high ground. But sometimes, other factors prevail. In this case, the chateau is on the site of some significant springs, the source of the local river.

Normandy has a lot of Viking history. Norman is “north men”. When the chateau was first built, it was fortified. This was a strategic location in the conflict between the King of France and the Vikings. A deal was struck such that the Vikings could have the area as long as they didn’t sail up the Seine and attack Paris.

The chateau was defortified centuries ago and has undergone a series of enhancements and extensions. The stone that made up the walls was used to add on to the main house as well as the outbuildings.

Before we went inside, Jeremy gave us a tour of the immediate grounds – the springs and a couple of the ponds. The grounds are kept wild, other than an area of lawn around the ponds where a few sculptures stand, including a five-foot-tall mouse looking with some trepidation at a similarly large mousetrap.

Inside, we were fed and entertained. Jeremy introduced us to Jerome, who gave us a demonstration of a pottery wheel and a lecture on porcelain, earthenware, and pottery. In the room where we mainly congregated, Patrick, a Senegalese musician, played his kora and sang. I declined the opportunity to throw a bowl on the wheel, but Patrick let me pick a couple of notes on his kora. It’s a home-made traditional African instrument, but with pickups for his amplifier.

The food was delightful. We had about a dozen different sorts of hors d’oeuvres. Jeremy described each one. One was a miniature hot dog, reimagined by a French chef. Another was in a little bowl made of hash brows. I liked some better than others, but I’d have any of them again. Delicious. We also had wine and champagne. The next course was cheese, 8 or 10 varieties, mostly local, with some bread and jams. Finally came the little desserts – one rum-flavored, one lemon, and a few chocolate. Again, I had one of each and will testify to their tastiness.

Jeremy was quite personable. I managed to chat with him a few times during the nearly four hours we were there. I asked some general questions about the upkeep involved in maintaining such a structure. He chuckled, said he didn’t really know much about repointing stone and rendering the exterior walls, and concluded with, “It’s a little scary, but that’s how you know you’re alive!” His face lit up.

Jeremy’s final treat for us was some home-made limoncello. The woman he bought the chateau from lives in Sicily and has a lemon orchard. She sent him 75 kilos of lemons, and he used some of them to make a batch of this digestif. I’m a simple man – generally, beer is my only alcoholic treat. Here, on restaurant menus, I see apéritifs and digestifs. An apéritif is an alcoholic beverage usually served before a meal to stimulate the appetite, while a digestif is served after a meal, traditionally believed to aid digestion. Limoncello is a digestif.

I admit I was disappointed yesterday with not getting enough time on the D-Day beaches. If I had planned the trip myself, I’d have been sure to spend more time there. On the other hand, I’d never have been able to come up with today’s activities. Today was quite enjoyable and is a big offset for yesterday’s disappointment.

Back in Honfleur, we were on our own for dinner. We went to a place that one of the other couples in the group recommended. Genae had a chicken dish while I had beef carpaccio. I didn’t really know what I was ordering, and that’s part of the appeal. I thought it was a dinner salad; the menu said arugula, beef, and shaved parmesan. It turns out it’s typically an appetizer, and I didn’t realize the beef would be raw. Adventures in dining! Afterward, we wandered through the old part of town until we found some ice cream for dessert.

One little side note. I love seeing all the cars we don’t have here. I’m not a fan of giant SUVs and pickup trucks, so I enjoy seeing the smaller cars. One I kept seeing is a little two-seater. I saw a few of them, all in a sort of primer gray. Walking down the sidewalk, we came across three teenagers getting out of one. I didn’t see how they were all in it, but it must have been a tight (and unlawful?) fit. I asked them if it’s electric. They didn’t speak any English, so one got his phone out and typed into a translator app. It took him a few tries to craft his answer, which was, “It runs on sperm.” It is, indeed, an electric vehicle, a Citroën Ami. I asked Rainer if, perhaps, the kid had made a typo, but he shook his head and smiled. They were having some fun with me.

Tuesday, June 30

This morning, we piled into our tour bus at 8:00 and headed to the D-Day beaches. We had looked at the weather report and decided we’d be comfortable in shorts and wouldn’t need our jackets. Although Paris had been suffering through a heat wave, here on the Normandy coast, it was a different world.

We picked up our tour guide on the way.

Our first stop would be Pegasus Bridge, about 3 or 3.5 miles inland from the easternmost landing beach, Sword. This bridge over the Caen Canal was an important target in the D-Day invasion. If captured successfully, it would limit the effectiveness of any German counterattack. British glider-borne forces made the attack, and this was the location of the first combat casualties of Operation Overlord.

As we drove east, it started to sprinkle, and the skies ahead grew darker. The bus has an LED display that alternates between the current time and the outside temperature. The temperature was slowly going down as we drove. By the time we got to Pegasus Bridge, the weather was fairly nasty. On the “good” side, we didn’t even get off the bus there: we parked on the side of the road while our guide told us the story.

There’s a museum there inside the bunker the Germans made to defend the bridge. The 1944 bridge no longer carries the road – it has been moved and is now a museum piece. Around the old bridge are other war machines – a Horsa glider, a tank, a truck, an artillery piece. Although I’m personally more interested in the American landing beaches than the sites of British and Canadian battles, it would have been nice to get a closer look at the old bunker.

After a few minutes, we were on the road to Arromanches. This little town sits right on the water in a crease between the bluffs that run along the shore here. To get here, we drove through the little tourist beach villages that have been built up along Sword and Juno beaches. Arromanches is in the Gold Beach sector. On our drive, we saw quite a few memorials, statues, and war machines, but we didn’t stop. No doubt, British or Canadian tourists on similar tours would get to stop at some of them.

I’ve read quite a bit about D-Day and knew the name Arromanches, but I couldn’t have told you what happened there. The town was spared bombardment and survived the war almost untouched, still featuring 18th- and 19th-century houses.

Arromanches is significant because it is where one of the Mulberrys was built. When the invasion was planned, the Allies knew that it would be an extended period of time before any port city could be captured, and that it might take weeks to get any captured port into working condition. The answer, then, was for the Allies to bring their own port. That’s what the Mulberrys were. We toured a nice museum devoted to the one that was constructed here, the remains of which are still not far offshore.

After the museum, we had lunch at a restaurant next door: cod with rice and a nice sauce. Dessert was two scoops of sherbet – one mango and one raspberry. I enjoyed the meal, but Genae found it less than satisfying. By the time we finished lunch, the weather had changed – it was now sunny and warmer, with a few high clouds. This change raised our spirits considerably.

From Arromanches, we proceeded to Pointe du Hoc. This is a militarily significant promontory between Omaha and Utah Beaches. Omaha Beach is 7km long, and at the western end, there’s a 16km stretch of cliffs that cannot be assaulted. Pointe du Hoc is on one of these cliffs and has a commanding view. It’s an ideal spot for big guns. Any German guns here needed to be put out of action, or casualties would be punishing.

This was a job for the Rangers. They scaled the cliffs using rocket-powered grappling hooks and ladders borrowed from the London Fire Department. When they gained the top, they discovered that the German artillery had been moved. All that was there were some telephone poles masquerading as guns, and some concrete emplacements that were still under construction. The Rangers held the high ground against repeated German counterattacks, suffering heavy losses.

The entire area is cratered by enormous shell holes. Paths for visitors wind between the craters. The concrete casemates are partially destroyed, but visitors can go down into the most intact one. I got a bit behind the group because of my compulsion to visit all these bunkers. Trying to catch back up, I passed other tour groups and caught snippets of their spiels. Each was telling a different story. There are many ways to tell the story of the combat here, and all can be true, but none can be complete.

Our last destination for the day was the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach. We timed it so that we’d get to see the flag-lowering ceremony. On the way there, we drove on the road right along a section of Omaha Beach, where we made a quick stop. I ran out toward the water. The tide was out – but I don’t know how low low tide is. The tide on D-Day would have been farther out than low tide today, and hours earlier. I tried to imagine how I’d have felt had I been part of it. My imagination failed completely. I regularly hike with a 35-pound pack, but I don’t run with it. Soldiers getting off the Higgins boats carried three times that weight and were running into Hell. The road that exits the beach and leads to the top of the bluffs looked like it was a mile away, surrounded by the remains of bunkers on the beach. If I had been here, would fear have paralyzed me, or driven me toward the exit road? The thought boggles.

We arrived at the cemetery a few minutes before the flag-lowering. I’d always believed that the cemetery was American land. It is not. We are in France, and this is French land. The cemetery, though, is administered by Americans. It was moving to be here for the flag-lowering, but that also meant our time was quite limited. After checking out the monument here, reminiscent of the one at the Punch Bowl in Hawai’i with its mosaic campaign maps and rosters of the fallen, we visited the museum there. Genae and I were the last visitors allowed in, and we went through the exhibits too quickly.

Our activities for the day complete, we returned to the hotel just before 7 after sitting a while in Caen’s rush hour traffic.

For dinner, we went back to the pizza place where we had lunch yesterday. “Pizza place” doesn’t do it justice – it’s a nice, little Italian restaurant with much more than pizza. After being disappointed with today’s lunch, Genae wanted to get some comfort food. I had the carbonara and a beer. We had recommended the place to a couple of other tour members, and when we got there, we were the fifth couple from the group to arrive. Rainer would have been so disappointed in us! For dessert, we split a chocolate mousse. Again, it was all very tasty.

Overall, I thought the day was a mixed bag. Aside from issues with the weather, we felt rushed. We drove past several places I’d have liked to investigate, and the places we did visit, we’d have liked to have had more time. I guess this is just how some of these sorts of group trips are.

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.

I’ve been getting flyers in the mail from the Roaming Buffs, an alumni-associated travel group, for ages. I almost always glance at them in a “where am I not going to go next?” sort of way. Pretty pictures of exotic places with prices that are out of our reach. I would love to go to any number of those places, but I don’t think I’m a If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium kind of traveler.

I did take that sort of trip when I went to the Soviet Union when I was in high school with my Russian language teacher. There were 38 of us kids, wrangled by 4 adults. The only way to manage such a group is on a guided tour. On the other hand, my Belgium trip was pretty much the exact opposite of a guided tour, no real plan, figuring out restaurants and subways on my own.

When I got back home from my Belgium trip last year, the latest Roaming Buffs brochure was on the counter. “Hey, Dave, let’s go to France next year.”

So, here we are. It’s a 9-day guided tour of Normandy. We fly round-trip direct from Denver to Paris on Air France. Since we fly out of Paris, why not spend a couple of nights there? We bought the airline tickets, then Air France sent me an email telling me that they’d canceled our return flight and booked us for the next day, so we’ll be there a third night.

Saturday, June 27, and Sunday, June 28 (Days 1 and 2)

Our flight is scheduled to depart at 5:40. Genae wants to follow the rules and get to the airport three hours early. That’s the kind of rule I historically tended to violate, as I’m not a big fan of hanging out in airports. But I complied (without protest), and Michael dropped us off at 2:40.

Before we even found where to drop off our checked bags, we stopped to get our passports and boarding passes out. I was shocked to see that the backpack compartment where I stowed my passport was unzipped. And the passport was not there. I had no doubt it was in that compartment, but I searched all the compartments three times. No joy. This is a great start to the trip.

I retraced my steps to where Michael dropped us off. Still no joy. So I phoned Michael. Hopefully, it fell out in the back of the car. Michael was being a good driver and not answering his phone when behind the wheel. I called him three times and sent him a text. Genae called him, and he still wasn’t answering.

I went to the Air France desk to see if our flight was on time. They said it was. I asked them how late we could check in, but over the course of the conversation got three different answers.

When I got back to the chairs where Genae was waiting, she said that she’d called Michael again and he’d finally answered. The passport was not in the car. So he had to go all the way home. He found it lying on the floor where I’d set our bags before we loaded the car. An hour after my initial panic, he was back at the airport to save the day. The only wrinkle was that I was waiting where he had dropped us off, but he made a wrong turn and was two levels down, so I had to run down to meet him before he was forced to make another lap.

Disaster averted, we went to the gate and waited to board. For some unknown reason, we did not board on time. Also, the PA system wasn’t working, so everybody piled up together at the same time rather than grouping by boarding zone. Chaos.

It was well after 6:00 before we took our seats. And waited. And waited. Finally, they pushed us away from the gate, and we taxied out to the runway, where we joined the queue for takeoff. Next, the pilot announced that the wind had changed and we needed to taxi to a different runway. Where we waited for some emergency vehicles to do something. In the end, it was after 7:15 before we took off.

Although I don’t fly much anymore, I have enough experience that my expectations for beverage and meal service aren’t very high. Still, Air France failed to meet my low expectations. I’m used to being able to get a whole can of soda to myself, but they were serving from 2-liter bottles, giving each passenger a tiny Dixie cup of about 3 ounces without a refill for a couple of hours. Yeesh. The dinner wasn’t bad – typical for airline food. The breakfast was disappointing. So it goes.

On my trip to Belgium last year, we departed a few minutes late, but the pilot burned some extra fuel to get us back on schedule. No such luck this time, and it looked like we weren’t taking the fastest route. A great circle route between Denver and Paris should have us going nearly to Hudson Bay, just south of Greenland, and over Ireland and England. Instead, we were flying almost due east. We later heard that, perhaps, we had avoided some bad weather along the shorter route.

My Fitbit tracks my sleep. When we got off the plane, I looked at what it had logged: a score of 40, whatever that means. Usually, my score is in the 80s. Whatever that means. I’m having a bit of trouble reconciling this. If sleeping 7 hours and 2 minutes gives me an 87 score, how did I score 40 by sleeping a whopping 2 minutes? Frankly, I’d have said I didn’t sleep at all.

We made our way through customs without incident, but we are disappointed that we didn’t get our passports stamped. Oh, well.

It was a three-hour drive from CDG to our hotel in Honfleur, including a stop at a highway rest stop. The toilets were free (nice surprise), and the vending machines were much more sophisticated than anything I’ve seen at home.

At the hotel, we had a meet-and-greet over beverages. This trip wasn’t put together by the Roaming Buffs, but by AHI, which, I believe, stands for Alumni Hospitality, Inc., or something to that effect. Our group was comprised of Roaming Buffs and Traveling Wildcats (Kansas State). Our tour coordinator was Rainer (pronounced “Rhine-er” rather than “rain-er”). He was born in the Netherlands but has lived in the south of France for quite some time. He speaks six languages. I wonder if he has a German accent in all of them.

The other travelers were, by and large, well-educated and successful. One couple brought their college-aged granddaughter along, and one woman was traveling solo; the rest were couples. We had a couple of doctors, a pilot, a farmer, and a private equity guy. Two of the guys were Vietnam vets. One guy was an avid birder; except when we were out for dinner, he wore binoculars strapped to his chest.

After our little get-together, we headed out to the restaurant. When feeding a large group like this, everybody gets the same meal. Tonight it was a salad (camembert cheese on toast, with strips of salmon and some greens) and what one of the other travelers called a “salmon burrito”. Dessert was half a dozen little treats. I don’t know what any of them were. Each was only a couple of bites, but all were delicious.

Genae’s not a big fan of salmon or cheese, so it was a less-than-ideal meal. We had limited control over menu selection. At all the group meals, everybody would be served the same dish.

Honfleur is at nearly 50° north latitude, so the sun doesn’t set until after 10, which is about when we returned to the hotel. I was looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

Here’s a group photo we took later in the week. Rainer is at the far left, giving us a thumbs-up.