Series The short way home... (gallery) (next entry =>)
My friends Shona and Stacy came from Vancouver and Toronto to travel with me through Europe. We started out by visiting Brussels and then we radiated a bit further, visiting Antwerp and Brugge.
Hubert lent us his Sweedish Tank (he prefers to call it my old lady), a Saab 9000. We headed straight for Normandy, and our first stop was to visit Claude Monet's house in Giverny, where we spent a few hours amongst the flowers and the waterlilies. Since we got there quite late in the day we avoided the crowds and were pretty much alone in the gardens. Then we went for a beer across the street, to the blaring music of Johnny Halliday. Quite a change of atmosphere in a few minutes...
Our next stop was Honfleur, a great little town with a beautiful harbour which was home to Erik Satie, composer of the Gymnopedia. Visiting his house was a surrealistic — almost hallucilogenic — moment truly, and I discovered a fascinating character with a lot of humour who saw his soul as a great pear with wings. My favourite quote was from the eulogy his brother delivered: Right now he must be saying to God: excuse-me for a moment while I put on a skirt... Satie was definitely in the league of the great surrealists. Besides the Satie house, we sampled various calvados (brandy made from distilled apple cider) and learned that Jacques de Montcalm set off to discover Canada from Honfleur.
Juno beach, where the Canadian troops landed during WWII. Picnic and wine on the way to Mont-St-Michel. The chocolate is Belgian!
Le Mont-St-Michel is an amazing sight, a fortified abbey parts of which date back to the 11th Century. Again we managed to get there at the end of the day and were able to walk through the streets without the big crowds that we found the next day when we visited the abbey itself. The island is in the middle of shallow bay with very strong tides — faster than a galloping horse they say — which protected the abbey through the ages. Today the bay is filling with sand, after a road was built to reach the monastery in the 70s; but there are plans to remove the road and build a pedestrian bridge in its place.