Site Home - What's New?-Feedback - About Jack-Travel/Art Links

From steep limestone rocks to a bridge where you pay toll just for pleasure, from a many coloured garden to a dashing parade horse, from a calvados distiller to a cow. And from sandy beach to green, soft hilly country to mountainous wall. Normandy is a many-sided destination.
Claude Monet said one:” I can do only two things: paint and garden.” I can’t do any of both, but its dahlias, asters, gladioli, poppy-heads and peonies inspire me. Giverny, Monet, you have them already in my “daytrips from Paris” series, but I keep reminding that wonderful place.
Normandy owns a great deal to the Seine river. It guides us from Paris into Normandy, through a valley with rose fields and right away those typical skilled worker houses.

Chateau Gaillard

In Les Andelys we see, high up on a hill, the 12^th century castle of Chateau-Gaillard, the chateau of Richard Lionheart. It looks carved in one piece out of the limestone rocks, starting already here to show but will surprise us on the Normandy coast. Along many, many miles, steep chalk-cliffs run along the sea, lighting up in the sun. This is the Cote d’Albatre, alabaster coast. 

Click to enlarge

 The most Nordic harbour is LeTréport.  The port is empty, the silt glitters like mother-of-pearl, and small boats wait helplessly for high tide. On the quays, neon lights attract attention to restaurants and waffle joints. At “La Viennoise” you can buy chocolate shrimps and oyster bonbons, but we (Annie and me, Jack) want to taste the real sea surprises and enter a place where we see that most people go. . “All we prepare comes directly from Honfleur, Trouville and own port”, assures the waitress. And we taste it, fresher than that and you die!

Etretat Arch

Honfleur

Riding through the famous ports of Dieppe and Fécamp we arrive in Etretat, seeing suddenly a treacherous sky above a changing sea, sometimes grey, then again blue or even purple. We loiter on the crackling pebble beach, enjoying the fabulous portals at each side of the chalk rocks, triumph arches, cut by the sea and where the waves swish around playfully.
This is only a small part of Normandy and I will take you around all the parts I visited, from Etretat to Mont-Saint-Michel, Deauville, Alençon to Rouen, passing Caen, Cherbourg, Le Havre, Lisieux, Pays d’Auge and many more. I will not forget the landing beaches and WWII memorials, the moving story of your boys and ours who liberated Europe through the landing in Normandy. A special section will be the home for the landing essays.
I will start with a brief (?), well not too long, I promise, historical presentation of Normandy, whose inhabitants once conquered Britannia, a long time ago. I researched a lot of historical pictures that are now public domain to illustrate Normandy from the Roman period, Rotomagus (Rouen) to the Channel tunnel.