Road Trip Through Normandy and Brittany: Monet's Garden, D-Day Beaches, Mont Saint-Michel, and a 250-Year-Old Sycamore

Part 5 of 8 in my travel series from the summer of 2022.

Leaving Paris for Giverny and Rouen (June 22nd)

Today, we departed Paris for Rouen. This involved getting packed and getting to Charles de Gaulle, where we had a rental car reserved. The Métro is so convenient for that. And this time I knew of the elevator from the sidewalk. (But you still have to get your heavy suitcases down from the ticketing level to the platform level, and that can be a challenge.) Once we got to the airport, it’s ridiculously hard to find the rental car area. Signs are generally lacking, and looking at Google Maps shows incomprehensible directions. It’s like being in a complete maze. We finally found our way and then waited in line for nearly an hour to get our car.

The exchange with the agent was a bit ridiculous. She asked how many drivers, and we said two, so I would not have to do all the driving. They didn’t mention that decision just added 100 euros to the cost. (And it turns out, unbeknownst to me, that Catherine can’t drive a stick anyway.) We opted for the base-level insurance, and that added a few hundred more euros. In the end, the car came to 1,650 euros for 13 days with a 1,500-euro deductible. After 30 minutes with the agent and about to sign the contract, we asked if we could take the second driver off since we just learned it cost more. Well, she would have to start all over again. Oh boy, screw it. Let’s get out of here.

So we were on the road with Catherine and Google Maps as my trusty navigators. Our ultimate destination was Rouen, but we were going to stop at Giverny, the home of Monet, on our way. The ride was rolling with many beautiful vistas.

Monet’s Garden at Giverny

Giverny is a small art colony of a town that basically formed around the fame of Monet, whose famous water lilies paintings and Japanese bridge paintings were done in his extensive gardens. After settling for lunch at the local art museum—before we knew there were better options if we had just held out a few more yards—we visited the house and garden of Monet. Both are extraordinary. And both are huge.

I really enjoyed the massive collection of plants, but I was really taken with the Japanese garden. You have to walk through a tunnel under a road to get there, and once on the other side, you’re in a Japanese water garden, complete with not one but two arched bridges. This is what Monet’s maniacal obsession with his garden resulted in, plus several priceless paintings. He pushed the boundaries of painting in his time, and things worked out well for ole’ Claude.

Rouen

Now we push on to Rouen. Rouen is the capital of Normandy and on our route to the Normandy beaches. Despite getting hit with a lot of Allied artillery (to drive out the Nazis), it still has enormous portions of downtown that seem almost straight out of the Middle Ages. There’s a critical mass of wood-timbered buildings making the entire downtown feel very authentic.

Catherine and I pulled into town tired and pretty hungry. Navigating the small streets and getting your bearings can get confusing and taxing. And that it was. After finally getting lucky finding free street parking not too far from where we were staying, we eventually found our well-hidden Airbnb after some frustrating missteps. We settled in and then went off to look for food. Finding packed bars with loud crowds on the sidewalks was easy—just throw a rock and you’ll hit a drunk French football fan. But finding food at that hour was a bit more challenging. We eventually found a Lebanese restaurant, and it was quite good.

Daguerre the Painter (June 23rd)

In the morning, Catherine and I went to the art museum. It has a pretty impressive collection of French painting, but I was taken by one particular painting. It looked like a very competent depiction of a scene in a cathedral: Interior of Rosslyn Chapel, from 1824. Then I noticed the painter’s name: Louis J. M. Daguerre. Wow! Was it the Daguerre? As a photographer, I know Daguerre as the inventor of the daguerreotype, the first photo process to be permanently fixed. The daguerreotype became hugely popular because it was the first time an image derived from the world could be permanently obtained. So he was a painter too???

I had to know more, and what I found is amazing. Prior to inventing the first commercially viable photographic process, he invented the diorama. He had a partnership and created a huge rotating theater that displayed enormous paintings (75 feet by 45 feet). A large version of Rosslyn Chapel was one of them. He stacked two different paintings on thin canvas and then projected light from behind so the rear painting would be projected onto the back of the painting facing the audience. Using various techniques, the illusion of movement could be created.

So here is an early immersive experience that predates photography, film, and virtual reality. In his partnership, he was basically the tech guy inventing the way the whole thing worked, and his partner was the painter. Then the partner withdrew and he took over the painting as well. He ran the operation for almost a decade until it burned down, as things so often did. But he got a big insurance settlement and moved on to change the world. He sold the patent to the daguerreotype to the French government in exchange for a lifetime pension, and the French government gave it to the world as a gift.

Rouen’s Notre-Dame Cathedral

After the museum, we started walking around the cobblestone streets of Rouen. There’s a lot to see: an extremely old clock tower, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake, and the bullet-riddled government building from the Middle Ages that is still in use today.

The narrow road suddenly opened up to Rouen’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, and wham—we were just struck dumbfounded by it at first glance. It takes your breath away. The fact that a guy was sitting there playing a pretty darn good accordion helped with the overall impression. It’s enormous and highly decorated, yet the small scale of the court in front of it does something to keep the whole thing intimate. You can only see something for the first time once, and I’m glad we came upon it like we did. This is the cathedral Monet painted repeatedly in various light.

Monet’s Cathedral painting in the Musée d’Orsay

Rouen’s Notre-Dame

We stopped by our car because we started to doubt it was free parking. Walking up to the car, I noticed some damage to the back bumper. Someone had somehow clipped our back corner on the driver’s side. But the car was parallel parked against the driver’s side. How could this happen? Our only thought was someone on a scooter or motorcycle tried to squeeze past to get on or off the sidewalk. Great. We’re probably going to be on the hook for the 1,500-euro deductible.

The Monastery at Saint-Wandrille (June 24th)

The sole reason I’m here is because my wife got a grant from the Lilly Foundation to immerse herself in French. She studied French on her own for the two years of COVID and now had an opportunity to use it in France. She learned it by doing the ENTIRE Duolingo French program and getting a tutor. Her grant proposal consisted of visiting places and interacting with people who have been featured in various stories heard on the Duolingo podcast.

One such place is a monastery outside of Rouen where the monks make beer. The podcast is about a young monk who joined the monastery a few years ago and then became in charge of changing the monks’ enterprise from photocopying (a modern-day version of scribing, I guess) to creating and brewing beer. The podcast is a great listen.

So today, we were scheduled to go to the monastery Saint-Wandrille outside of Rouen, but first we met my daughter, Amalia, at the bus station on the way. Amalia is going to be traveling with us for the next week.

We drove the 40 minutes or so out of town and reached the monastery. The tour is only in French, and the man giving the tour was obviously into going into great detail. That has been my general impression of the French. One example is wall text in museums is waaaay longer than anything you would see in the US. So this tour guide gathered the group and then walked us 20 feet away and proceeded to talk for 30 minutes before walking us another 30 feet and talking for 20 minutes. And this was repeated numerous times. At this rate we were going to be here all week. Of course I have no idea what he’s saying, so the minutes really drag on for me.

The tour was pretty comprehensive, but it did not include anything about the beer. I thought we would have a monk showing us around and talking all about the brewing process. It was just the opposite. We did see the monks doing the Gregorian chanting in their chapel, and that was pretty cool. In the end, we went to their store and bought three of their beers. They were actually pretty good.

That evening we took Amalia back to the Lebanese restaurant we had gone to the other night. We tried to stay awake for the video-mapping show on the Rouen Cathedral, but it wasn’t going to start until 11 PM and we just didn’t have enough energy left.

Inside the Rouen Cathedral (June 25th)

We let Amalia sleep in while Catherine and I went into the Rouen Notre-Dame Cathedral. They were doing a lot of restoration work inside, which was a bit distracting. Oddly, as impressive as it was, I was more taken with the exterior than the interior.

After we got back to the Airbnb, we got packed up. We were leaving today for the small town of Bayeux, a town near the Normandy beaches. And we were stopping first in Caen to go to the WWII museum there. So we had a bit of driving in our future.

The Caen Memorial Museum

Caen has a very impressive WWII museum where we got a deep lesson in the details of D-Day and the Normandy battles for liberation. The story is of course intense. But one salient feeling I came away with is that the Allied defeat of the Axis Powers was the last great effort of the US, and today as a country we are not honoring those who died by living up to our ideals as a nation. We as a country are circling the drain due to tribalism and an actual contempt for democracy by so many people.

Anyway, the museum was great and the film they showed was extremely powerful. But it’s a huge dose to swallow. It leaves you feeling a bit overwhelmed.

Bayeux

From there we went to the small town of Bayeux. In Bayeux we had a very delightful Airbnb in the heart of town, right around the corner from the cathedral.

That night Amalia made us a huge salad so we wouldn’t have to eat out, and we enjoyed one of our monk-brewed beers. After eating, we had a nice walk around the cute little town. It’s pretty small but very picturesque. Behind the cathedral we discovered a quiet square with an enormous sycamore tree that, according to the sign, was planted in 1797. It was the largest sycamore I’ve ever seen. It was very impressive, and the photos don’t do it justice.

Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery (June 26th)

This morning we drove to the American cemetery at Omaha Beach. The first thing we did was walk down to Omaha Beach. It’s expansive, and the ruins of German gunnery stations are still on the hill above the beach. At least one had been converted to a memorial.

The feelings are tangible as you stand there, looking out at the water. You feel you’re standing on hallowed ground where efforts and sacrifices of unimaginable proportions were made.

We spent a while on the beach and Amalia went swimming. The cemetery has an outstanding museum. We went there next. It’s subterranean, so it makes a small visible footprint. Again, it was a ton of information and very intense feelings to process. Afterward, we walked around the highly manicured cemetery grounds.

Back at the apartment we enjoyed another Amalia salad and another monk beer. The weather has been very cool and rainy, as is typical for this part of the country. But the rain doesn’t seem to last very long. The weather cycles through pretty quickly.

The Bayeux Tapestry (June 27th)

In the morning before departing, we went to the Bayeux Museum to see the Bayeux Tapestry. It’s a 70-meter-long tapestry relating the conquest of England by the Duke of Normandy in 1066. There’s an excellent audio commentary deciphering the tapestry. There’s also an informative exhibit that goes into a lot of detail about the origins and history of the tapestry. Given what it has been through for nearly 1,000 years, it’s remarkable that it was in such incredible condition. You would not want to visit Bayeux without seeing the tapestry.

Mont Saint-Michel

We left Bayeux today to head toward Mont Saint-Michel, a place I’ve wanted to visit ever since I saw photos of it over 20 years ago. MSM is a town with a cathedral that is an island in a bay. At low tide the bay is literally miles of sand. But the island is largely surrounded by water at high tide, depending on how high the tide is. During the last 100 years or so, the silt has been accumulating in the bay and impacting the degree to which the island gets surrounded at high tide. To help mitigate this, they dammed the river so it only releases silt as the tide goes out, and they changed the causeway to the island so that it has a bridge and the tide can flow in and out underneath.

MSM is a bit of a peak, so we could spot it from a distance as we drove nearer. That in itself was a bit of a thrill. It’s hard to explain why. I guess partly because of the magic I project onto it and partly just the unique aesthetic aspects of its geography and built shape.

Before we went to MSM, we needed to drop Amalia off at a train station in a nearby town. She was going to Rennes to visit her host family from when she was in high school so that Catherine and I could have a couple of days alone for our first anniversary.

So we dropped off Amalia and had a quick bite before driving the last few miles. Parking is a bit crazy and the French tendency to put a low priority on signage makes it unnecessarily challenging. They have a special place to park for people staying overnight on the island. We found that out after parking and rolling our bags 500 yards over the rough gravel parking lot. We eventually found the place to park and got on the tram to the island. You can either walk, ride a bike, or take the tram. With our bags there was no choosing.

We had a room in a hotel from the 19th century that is located directly outside the drawbridge into the town. Yes, there is a drawbridge. The hotel feels very historic, with signed and framed posters of dignitaries and celebrities who have visited over the last 150 years. We settled in and had a quick walk around the very touristy and packed streets. Tourists come to the island to the tune of 3 million visitors a year, but most people just come for the day. They start pouring in around 8 AM and leaving after dinner.

We had dinner reservations at the restaurant of the hotel. It’s a place famous for its omelettes, a secret recipe from the 18th century. We could see them cooking them in an enormous fireplace as we waited for our table.

Exploring Mont Saint-Michel (June 28th)

I got up very early, before the arrival of the hordes, and set out with both my digital camera and the Mamiya to shoot the town. In a part of the country that typically gets a lot of rain, we lucked out with some beautiful weather.

The reason we’re in MSM is not because I’ve dreamed of going here for 20+ years—it’s because there was a Duolingo podcast about a guy who fell in love with MSM at a young age and had a dream of living there and being a tour guide at the cathedral. Now, nearly 40 years later, he is the only one who possesses all the keys to the cathedral.

Catherine had hoped to meet him and tell him about her grant. That afternoon we had a cathedral tour scheduled, and Catherine was indeed able to meet him. He let her hold the keys to the cathedral for a photo, and he invited us to attend vespers that evening.

Dinan and Its Farmers’ Market (June 29th–30th)

In the morning, we left MSM and met Amalia at a train station before heading to the little town of Dinan. We have a couple of one-night stopovers before arriving in Bordeaux. Dinan is a small cute town that was fun to explore, but many things were closed. When we asked why, we were told that since so many people visit this area for the summer holiday in July and August, the shop owners want to get their vacation time beforehand so they can be open in July and August. Good for them, not so good for us. Luckily there was a great little restaurant that was open that we went to a couple of times.

The next morning, Amalia and I came across an enormous farmers’ market. It seemed disproportionally large for a town the size of Dinan. The produce was stunning and delicious. The best-tasting strawberries I’ve ever had. I had not been to a European farmers’ market since 1984, and they seem to have changed quite a bit. Many vendors have these incredibly tricked-out vehicles with huge glass showcases. I’m sure some of them are franchise owners, but still it’s pretty amazing. They take their farmers’ markets VERY seriously in Europe. It makes US farmers’ markets look like a bunch of low-budget amateurs.

Catherine showed up soon, and we had a lot of fun exploring and shopping. Catherine got a lot of French practice talking with various vendors. We went back to the same cheese man at least three times, buying more things. I even got a Mamiya portrait of him. And we bought dried apricots from a Moroccan man.