We have just had a glorious day.
We’ve just arrived in France after several weeks in Scandinavia and the Low Countries. To date, I haven’t written about any given day, but today was such a beautiful day, well, I am compelled.
We had a long day in the car yesterday so we woke up thinking that we today would be a quiet day. We’re trying to tell ourselves that when you are travelling for five months you don’t have to “Do” something every day.
So today we were going to try and just “Be”. And it was a lovely day to make that attempt. The sun was shining, the sky a brilliant blue with little whispy clouds. So it was an outside kind of day.
The house we are renting is in Longues sur Mer. It’s near Mont Saint Michel which we visited on our second trip to France and just down the road from Bayeux. Bayeux is a hugely historical town, filled with wonders but for me, it is home to the 70 metre by one metre embroidered tapestry depicting the history of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. I know, I know, I’ve gone on and on in the past about this tapestry but it really is stunning.
Anyway, we decided we would start the day with a visit to the Bayeux market and stock up on the vegetables we have been sadly lacking in the last few weeks. Thanks to “lady”, our GPS, we arrived still speaking to each other, found a place to park, grabbed our shopping bag, and headed off to the market.
The market was stunning. It was physically about the size of the St. Albert Farmers’ market but where that one is one stall deep, this one was about 10 rows deep. And it had everything. Cheeses, wine, apple cider (they are famous for cider in Normandy), preserves, pates, fresh breads, and not just seafood but just about every crustacean you could imagine along with salmon, tuna, halibut, eel, grey shrimp (a local delicacy) etc, beef, pork (Ken had a yen for bacon but when we found it, it was priced at 20 euros a kilogram, so we passed it by), fruits (the strawberries smelled like the sun), vegetables, hand bags, shoes, socks, table cloths, fabric for table cloths by the yard, sweaters, dresses, and at the very back, live chickens and rabbits. And flowers. Glorious flowers.
Not just flowers but bedding plants. Here we are in the middle of October and they are still selling bedding plants here: things like violets and pansies.
We could barely stagger back to the car with our purchases.
One of our purchases was paella for lunch. I got a single serving. We both ate from it and had left overs (more on where and how we ate it later). We could have purchased cassoulet, couscous, roasted chickens, kebabs, burgers. The food trucks that weren’t part of the market, lined the streets around the market No one was going home hungry. We certainly didn’t.
(Side note: Ken just started his soup and called me into the kitchen. We, who buy live crab and mussels, cook them and clean them without flinching, are flinching. Our lovely farm fresh chicken has come entire. It has been plucked, but it’s head is still attached. We are afraid to find out what is inside it.)
We came home to put things away then not wanting to waste the glorious day, headed out with a paella picnic to see what we could find.
What we found were some historic World War II sites.
We picnicked on a rocky beach, staggering over the boulders that youngsters were leaping across, sitting on some and using others as tables for our food and drink, then feeling our ages as we tried to stand up in unsure footing. It seemed oddly peaceful, knowing that 70 years ago it was the furthest thing from that.
From our beach, we could see the artificial Mulberry harbours at Arromanches ….concrete boxes dumped into the ocean to create an artificial harbour (one of two harbours made this way) to help the Allies land men, equipment, and supplies. They sunk some old ships as part of this too.
According to what I have read, the harbour at Arromanches was made up 71 Phoenix block ships (don’t know, just read it in my research), 500 metres of unloading quays and eight floating roads. It was used for 100 days, and in that time, 400,000 soldiers, 500,000 vehicles and 4 million tons of supplies were landed, allowing repairs to be made to the Cherbourg port.
After our picnic, we explored the Batteries de Longues sur Mer…. the German battery of guns that were part of Hitler’s Atlantic wall during World War II. This was an arrangement of four batteries each holding armaments that would fire 45 kilogram bombs 22 kilometres. All are still standing.
From there we went to Arromanches and walked the beaches. In the distance we could see Juno, Utah, Omaha. But war was where it should be. It was in the past. The present was the gift of a glorious day in the sun, on the beach. Imagine, wading in the Atlantic in mid-October in the sun. Wearing shorts.
It was wonderful.
