Filling in the blanks
May. 18th, 2006 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringNormandy, 9 April 2006
My little upstairs room in the Hotel de la Gare in Bayeux was modest, but supremely comfortable. I don't need much to make me happy, and a double bed, a tacked on ensuite bathroom and a view of the station yard was more than enough for me.
I'd also stopped in at a French supermarket the day before and bought some necessities like laundry powder tablets, spring water, dried apricots, some sweets for the kids and some snacks for me.
I find myself fascinated by foreign grocery shops. Japan was just weird, but France had a frisson of differentness about it. Did they make their potato chips any different to those at home? Better buy a pack just to make sure... Oooh, look, a variety of Lindt chocolate that doesn't get exported to Australia. One pack for the kids and one for me.
I think I've discovered how I managed to put on a few extra kilos, and it wasn't just airline food!
On the other hand, the dried apricots were a surefire way of keeping myself regular. Customs and immigration tend to frown on fresh fruit, but dried apricots seem to get through without a challenge.
And I was trying to go around the world without drinking the local water. I'm sure that the places I went had eminently potable water, but all it needs is just one tummy bug at the wrong time...
Anyway, French television held no interest for me, and so I spent a fair bit of my evenings either writing on my laptop or reading a John Grisham thriller with a ready supply of snack food and Rooibos tea at my elbow.
Another activity was in filling up my travel journal. I have a supply of Levenger Circa notebooks, into which I paste ticket stubs, maps, postcards, all the little ephemera of travel. And I write notes and comments in it while the events are fresh in my mind. The Circa system allows me to add in or move around pages, and I carry a glue stick and use the scissors from my Swiss Army pocket knife to trim out photographs from brochures and paste them in. All in all, it's an excellent way to document my travels, but it has to be done on a regular basis, otherwise I put it off and I end up lugging home a kilogram or two of paper, which sits around until I have time to finish the task, which is never.
Sunday today, and the plan was to travel to St Malo on the Brittany coast where I had booked a ferry to Guernsey. On the map the journey seemed to be eminently do-able, with plenty of time left over for sightseeing.
So I got up early, packed up, ate up my breakfast croissant and drank down my coffee, handed the key back to my helpful French host, and filled up my little Opel with my luggage. I'd like to say that it settled down on its springs as I hefted the bags into the tiny hatchback, but honestly, it wasn't that much, maybe 70 kilograms total. It just felt heavy.
Goodbye Bayeux! I never did get to see the tapestry. Maybe another time.
I had one more task to do before I left Normandy. One of my trademark BookCrossing stunts is to wrap a book up in a couple of ziploc bags and wild release it into a body of water. Odd, but I have a remarkable catch rate from such releases. People see a book floating in a fountain or pond, they get curious about it, rescue it and journal it.
I had a copy of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in my luggage and I'd somehow left it behind on the previous day. So I had to go back to Omaha Beach. I selected the tiny village of St-Laurent-sur-Mer where a dramatic sculpture is placed on the beach sand.
Two ziploc bags around the book and with an equally dramatic gesture I hurl it into the ocean. What invariably happens next is that the book hits the water, bobs around in the waves for a few moments and then slides ashore, to be retrieved by a beach walker.
This book was no surprise, and like the soldiers of sixty years ago, it stumbled ashore and lay down on the sand. A few walkers looked at it, but I left before anybody picked it up.
I liked Omaha Beach. A long, wide beach of golden sand. A great place for the kids in summer, no doubt.
Although I tried to conjure up the incredible invasion fleet that arrived one June dawn, the hellfire reception, the carnage and the awful litter, I couldn't really do more than begin to imagine it. It's too nice a plage. Maybe a veteran of that day would have a more immediate reaction, but not I.
I got into my little German car and headed away.
As I munched on French potato chips from the open pack on the seat beside me - some odd spicy flavour that sounded better than the reality - I contemplated my options. In bare driving time, I was going to come up short. There just wasn't that much road between me and St Malo to fill in the hours. There was a side trip I wanted to take along the way, but I was still going to get to the ferry terminal a long time before sailing time at seven o'clock.
I was due to deliver the car there at three, but as the rental office was closed on Sunday adfternoons, I suspected that so long as the keys and contract were in the drop box on Monday morning, nobody was going to give a French fiddle as to when I actually dropped them in.
So I had a bit of time up my sleeve, and there was one place I wanted to visit, which wasn't too far out of my way.
So instead of turning south to St Lo, I kept going north on the Cherbourg road, alternating potato chips with swigs of pamplemousse flavoured mineral water.
The German defenders on the morning of the invasion ate their breakfast rashions either hot from a French farmhouse kitchen, or delivered to their blockhouses and gun emplacements. There is one marvellous tale told of a French resistance member who was watching the Germans as he had done every other morning for months and years beforehand. Ever morning at a certain time, a German soldier on a tubby old French horse would drop off the breakfasts at one fighting position after another, and the Resistance man, watching throug binoculars from a vantage point, would mark off the locations and how many meals were delivered.
The morning of the invasion the same German soldier came sleepily plodding along the same old path until he crested the ridge above the beach and stopped in amazement as he gazed at the huge invasion fleet stretching across the horizon and growing steadily closer. He then whipped his horse around and headed for the interior just before the shelling began. I guess the Germans along that stretch of beach went hungry that morning.
The men in the landing craft were probably even emptier. Despite the best efforts of the navy cooks, it was a rare soldier who wasn't seasick after hours (days in some cases) of bouncing around the English Channel in a flat-bottomed box.
Best off, food-wise, were the paratroopers. They had a hot dinner, got into their aircraft and dropped straight into battle on a full stomach.
And, speaking of paratroopers, my bonus destination this morning was the village of St Mere Eglise, where the airborne dropped in and found themselves in severe trouble. Instead of arriving by surprise in a sleeping village just after midnight, they discovered that the villagers were up and about fighting a fire in a barn near the church, along with the German garrison, who were alert and armed.
Many of the airborne troops were shot down before they hit the ground, the survivors were captured, and it wasn't until several hours later that the village was taken by fresh airborne troops who had landed some distance away. The village wasn't that important in itself - what made it crucial was the fact that it stood at the intersection of two major roads, control of which would give a tremendous advantage to either the Germans rushing up reinforcements to contain the invasion, or the Americans struggling to break out of their beachhead.
The village is almost exactly the same now as it was then. Some of the shops around the village square are now converted into souvenir shops, and there is a museum on the site of the barn, but otherwise it is untouched.
A little disappointing, somehow, compared to the dramatic bomb craters of Pointe du Hoc where I had commenced my quick tour of the Normandy battlefields, but how much more pleasant an outcome for the village to be liberated without being bombed flat.
I bought a postcard or two for my travel journal and then headed south. Back on the motorway, following the signs for St Lo and then St Malo. Nothing to it, really. I set the cruise control to 110kmh (the speed limit was actually 130kmh, but this only applied for drivers having held a French licence for more than two years) and fiddled with the radio.
To my vast delight I was able to catch BBC Radio Guernsey on 1116 AM, and it totally made my day to be able to hear the station live on air, instead of at second-hand via the internet. My favorite presenter, Jenny Kendall-Tobias, wasn't on, but just to listen to the station was enough for me - I was grinning hugely and singing along happily.
The motorway skirted Avranches and I turned west, following the signs for St Malo. A few kilometres further on I spotted the turnoff for my sidetrip, a quick detour to Mont St Michel, the extraordinary mediaeval monastery fortress on a rocky islet just offshore.
It was just like the pictures. Long curving causeway out to a steep cone of an island crowned by a cathedral. I didn't try to get all the way out to the island because access was limited and most visitors had to park and walk along the causeway. I'm sure I would have found it fascinating to explore the island, but I could see this consuming a fair chunk of the afternoon.
Instead I released a book by the side of the causeway, and to my delight the book was caught by a Scottish tourist and released outside the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam a few days later.
I'm not sure I mentioned it, but I released two books in Hiroshima, one of which was The Diary of Anne Frankand this fresh link was pure serendipity.
Back on the road and suddenly I was driving through the outskirts of St Malo. I'd been told that it was a remarkably beautiful town, but I couldn't see it. I found a petrol station to fill the hire car tank before dropping it off, and then it was a matter of following the signs to the prt and ferry terminal. I poked around a bit and found the rental car park, unloaded my luggage, stripped out the litter of snack food wrappers and soft drink containers which had somehow managed to cover the floor on the passengers side, took a series of digital photographs to prove I hadn't scratched the paint, and headed off for the ferry check in.
Once I'd unloaded my baggage, I had about four hours left before boarding, so I hoisted by backpack on my shoulders and set out for a belated lunch and maybe an internet cafe.
I turned a corner and that's when I discovered why St Malo was recommended to me. On the far side of the inner harbour rose a mediaeval walled city with huge old stone houses and a cathedral poking out of the middle. An amazing sight really, and for the next few hours I roamed around the sunny battlements, gazing out on one side to a remarkably pleasant bay liberally strewn with beaches and islands, and on the other side to the narrow streets of the old town. There were tourists aplenty, and when I made my way down into the town proper, I discovered that the streets were lined with souvenir shops, restaurants, boutiques, and about a million icecream stalls, all aimed at the well-heeled traveller.
But there was no charge for looking, and I did plenty of that. Another place to come back and visit when I'm rich.
The ferry to Guernsey was one of our Australian-designed Incat catarmarans. I've been aboard several of these ships, and they are remarkably comfortable vessels. This one seemed to be full of English tourists returning home after a weekend in France, and I rejoiced to be back with my own language once again. My command of the French language is tres petit, and like the Japanese immigation officials, I shied away from anything much deeper than "Bonjour" and "Merci".
Luckily the onboard cafe took Euros, probably at a ruinous discount, otherwise I would have gone hungry. I had a decent serve of hot curry as we pulled away from the coast, and for the hour or so it took to make the crossing to Jersey, I immersed myself in John Grisham as the sun set and the twilight deepened.
Jersey wasn't much more than a floodlit waterfront by the time we got there, and I presented myself, along with a few other foreigners to the immigration official who boarded the ferry to stamp our passports. Makes a change from Dover or Heathrow, I guess.
Guernsey was another half hour away, and getting dark and cold as I dragged my bags off the ferry and along the front to my hotel, a tiny little bed and breakfast place for thirty quid a night.
I made myself a cup of proper English tea and watched some proper British television before turning out the lights. I'd had a wonderful day, but tomorrow looked set to be even better!
My little upstairs room in the Hotel de la Gare in Bayeux was modest, but supremely comfortable. I don't need much to make me happy, and a double bed, a tacked on ensuite bathroom and a view of the station yard was more than enough for me.
I'd also stopped in at a French supermarket the day before and bought some necessities like laundry powder tablets, spring water, dried apricots, some sweets for the kids and some snacks for me.
I find myself fascinated by foreign grocery shops. Japan was just weird, but France had a frisson of differentness about it. Did they make their potato chips any different to those at home? Better buy a pack just to make sure... Oooh, look, a variety of Lindt chocolate that doesn't get exported to Australia. One pack for the kids and one for me.
I think I've discovered how I managed to put on a few extra kilos, and it wasn't just airline food!
On the other hand, the dried apricots were a surefire way of keeping myself regular. Customs and immigration tend to frown on fresh fruit, but dried apricots seem to get through without a challenge.
And I was trying to go around the world without drinking the local water. I'm sure that the places I went had eminently potable water, but all it needs is just one tummy bug at the wrong time...
Anyway, French television held no interest for me, and so I spent a fair bit of my evenings either writing on my laptop or reading a John Grisham thriller with a ready supply of snack food and Rooibos tea at my elbow.
Another activity was in filling up my travel journal. I have a supply of Levenger Circa notebooks, into which I paste ticket stubs, maps, postcards, all the little ephemera of travel. And I write notes and comments in it while the events are fresh in my mind. The Circa system allows me to add in or move around pages, and I carry a glue stick and use the scissors from my Swiss Army pocket knife to trim out photographs from brochures and paste them in. All in all, it's an excellent way to document my travels, but it has to be done on a regular basis, otherwise I put it off and I end up lugging home a kilogram or two of paper, which sits around until I have time to finish the task, which is never.
Sunday today, and the plan was to travel to St Malo on the Brittany coast where I had booked a ferry to Guernsey. On the map the journey seemed to be eminently do-able, with plenty of time left over for sightseeing.
So I got up early, packed up, ate up my breakfast croissant and drank down my coffee, handed the key back to my helpful French host, and filled up my little Opel with my luggage. I'd like to say that it settled down on its springs as I hefted the bags into the tiny hatchback, but honestly, it wasn't that much, maybe 70 kilograms total. It just felt heavy.
Goodbye Bayeux! I never did get to see the tapestry. Maybe another time.
I had one more task to do before I left Normandy. One of my trademark BookCrossing stunts is to wrap a book up in a couple of ziploc bags and wild release it into a body of water. Odd, but I have a remarkable catch rate from such releases. People see a book floating in a fountain or pond, they get curious about it, rescue it and journal it.
I had a copy of Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day in my luggage and I'd somehow left it behind on the previous day. So I had to go back to Omaha Beach. I selected the tiny village of St-Laurent-sur-Mer where a dramatic sculpture is placed on the beach sand.
Two ziploc bags around the book and with an equally dramatic gesture I hurl it into the ocean. What invariably happens next is that the book hits the water, bobs around in the waves for a few moments and then slides ashore, to be retrieved by a beach walker.
This book was no surprise, and like the soldiers of sixty years ago, it stumbled ashore and lay down on the sand. A few walkers looked at it, but I left before anybody picked it up.
I liked Omaha Beach. A long, wide beach of golden sand. A great place for the kids in summer, no doubt.
Although I tried to conjure up the incredible invasion fleet that arrived one June dawn, the hellfire reception, the carnage and the awful litter, I couldn't really do more than begin to imagine it. It's too nice a plage. Maybe a veteran of that day would have a more immediate reaction, but not I.
I got into my little German car and headed away.
As I munched on French potato chips from the open pack on the seat beside me - some odd spicy flavour that sounded better than the reality - I contemplated my options. In bare driving time, I was going to come up short. There just wasn't that much road between me and St Malo to fill in the hours. There was a side trip I wanted to take along the way, but I was still going to get to the ferry terminal a long time before sailing time at seven o'clock.
I was due to deliver the car there at three, but as the rental office was closed on Sunday adfternoons, I suspected that so long as the keys and contract were in the drop box on Monday morning, nobody was going to give a French fiddle as to when I actually dropped them in.
So I had a bit of time up my sleeve, and there was one place I wanted to visit, which wasn't too far out of my way.
So instead of turning south to St Lo, I kept going north on the Cherbourg road, alternating potato chips with swigs of pamplemousse flavoured mineral water.
The German defenders on the morning of the invasion ate their breakfast rashions either hot from a French farmhouse kitchen, or delivered to their blockhouses and gun emplacements. There is one marvellous tale told of a French resistance member who was watching the Germans as he had done every other morning for months and years beforehand. Ever morning at a certain time, a German soldier on a tubby old French horse would drop off the breakfasts at one fighting position after another, and the Resistance man, watching throug binoculars from a vantage point, would mark off the locations and how many meals were delivered.
The morning of the invasion the same German soldier came sleepily plodding along the same old path until he crested the ridge above the beach and stopped in amazement as he gazed at the huge invasion fleet stretching across the horizon and growing steadily closer. He then whipped his horse around and headed for the interior just before the shelling began. I guess the Germans along that stretch of beach went hungry that morning.
The men in the landing craft were probably even emptier. Despite the best efforts of the navy cooks, it was a rare soldier who wasn't seasick after hours (days in some cases) of bouncing around the English Channel in a flat-bottomed box.
Best off, food-wise, were the paratroopers. They had a hot dinner, got into their aircraft and dropped straight into battle on a full stomach.
And, speaking of paratroopers, my bonus destination this morning was the village of St Mere Eglise, where the airborne dropped in and found themselves in severe trouble. Instead of arriving by surprise in a sleeping village just after midnight, they discovered that the villagers were up and about fighting a fire in a barn near the church, along with the German garrison, who were alert and armed.
Many of the airborne troops were shot down before they hit the ground, the survivors were captured, and it wasn't until several hours later that the village was taken by fresh airborne troops who had landed some distance away. The village wasn't that important in itself - what made it crucial was the fact that it stood at the intersection of two major roads, control of which would give a tremendous advantage to either the Germans rushing up reinforcements to contain the invasion, or the Americans struggling to break out of their beachhead.
The village is almost exactly the same now as it was then. Some of the shops around the village square are now converted into souvenir shops, and there is a museum on the site of the barn, but otherwise it is untouched.
A little disappointing, somehow, compared to the dramatic bomb craters of Pointe du Hoc where I had commenced my quick tour of the Normandy battlefields, but how much more pleasant an outcome for the village to be liberated without being bombed flat.
I bought a postcard or two for my travel journal and then headed south. Back on the motorway, following the signs for St Lo and then St Malo. Nothing to it, really. I set the cruise control to 110kmh (the speed limit was actually 130kmh, but this only applied for drivers having held a French licence for more than two years) and fiddled with the radio.
To my vast delight I was able to catch BBC Radio Guernsey on 1116 AM, and it totally made my day to be able to hear the station live on air, instead of at second-hand via the internet. My favorite presenter, Jenny Kendall-Tobias, wasn't on, but just to listen to the station was enough for me - I was grinning hugely and singing along happily.
The motorway skirted Avranches and I turned west, following the signs for St Malo. A few kilometres further on I spotted the turnoff for my sidetrip, a quick detour to Mont St Michel, the extraordinary mediaeval monastery fortress on a rocky islet just offshore.
It was just like the pictures. Long curving causeway out to a steep cone of an island crowned by a cathedral. I didn't try to get all the way out to the island because access was limited and most visitors had to park and walk along the causeway. I'm sure I would have found it fascinating to explore the island, but I could see this consuming a fair chunk of the afternoon.
Instead I released a book by the side of the causeway, and to my delight the book was caught by a Scottish tourist and released outside the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam a few days later.
I'm not sure I mentioned it, but I released two books in Hiroshima, one of which was The Diary of Anne Frankand this fresh link was pure serendipity.
Back on the road and suddenly I was driving through the outskirts of St Malo. I'd been told that it was a remarkably beautiful town, but I couldn't see it. I found a petrol station to fill the hire car tank before dropping it off, and then it was a matter of following the signs to the prt and ferry terminal. I poked around a bit and found the rental car park, unloaded my luggage, stripped out the litter of snack food wrappers and soft drink containers which had somehow managed to cover the floor on the passengers side, took a series of digital photographs to prove I hadn't scratched the paint, and headed off for the ferry check in.
Once I'd unloaded my baggage, I had about four hours left before boarding, so I hoisted by backpack on my shoulders and set out for a belated lunch and maybe an internet cafe.
I turned a corner and that's when I discovered why St Malo was recommended to me. On the far side of the inner harbour rose a mediaeval walled city with huge old stone houses and a cathedral poking out of the middle. An amazing sight really, and for the next few hours I roamed around the sunny battlements, gazing out on one side to a remarkably pleasant bay liberally strewn with beaches and islands, and on the other side to the narrow streets of the old town. There were tourists aplenty, and when I made my way down into the town proper, I discovered that the streets were lined with souvenir shops, restaurants, boutiques, and about a million icecream stalls, all aimed at the well-heeled traveller.
But there was no charge for looking, and I did plenty of that. Another place to come back and visit when I'm rich.
The ferry to Guernsey was one of our Australian-designed Incat catarmarans. I've been aboard several of these ships, and they are remarkably comfortable vessels. This one seemed to be full of English tourists returning home after a weekend in France, and I rejoiced to be back with my own language once again. My command of the French language is tres petit, and like the Japanese immigation officials, I shied away from anything much deeper than "Bonjour" and "Merci".
Luckily the onboard cafe took Euros, probably at a ruinous discount, otherwise I would have gone hungry. I had a decent serve of hot curry as we pulled away from the coast, and for the hour or so it took to make the crossing to Jersey, I immersed myself in John Grisham as the sun set and the twilight deepened.
Jersey wasn't much more than a floodlit waterfront by the time we got there, and I presented myself, along with a few other foreigners to the immigration official who boarded the ferry to stamp our passports. Makes a change from Dover or Heathrow, I guess.
Guernsey was another half hour away, and getting dark and cold as I dragged my bags off the ferry and along the front to my hotel, a tiny little bed and breakfast place for thirty quid a night.
I made myself a cup of proper English tea and watched some proper British television before turning out the lights. I'd had a wonderful day, but tomorrow looked set to be even better!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 04:55 am (UTC)But let's say it that way... You could have drunk it without problems at least here in Europe.... as long as it tasted you. It's all about the taste!:-)
(if you ever happen to come to Switzerland... the Lindt country..;-) The tap water here is of a better quality than many mineral waters have..... so don't worry about bugs!:-))
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 07:51 pm (UTC)I must repeat "Thank you!".
Question - how do you get away with 70kg? are you travelling on first class tickets?
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 08:12 pm (UTC)Any air travel passing through the USA gets two pieces of luggage as a right, so even if an individual leg of my RTW ticket doesn't go through the USA, I'm still given the allowance because the trip as a whole does.
Each piece of luggage may be up to 35 kilos. I have two large pieces, and two carry on bags, as well as the bits I stuff in the pockets of my cargo pants. 70 kilos is probably the upper limit, but remember that I'm toting around a lot of books, and my extra-large rolling duffle could take around 50 kilos by itself if I packed it full.
Paradoxically, I had to gradually whittle down my total weight for the flights to and from and inside the US, because American Airlines has introduced a policy limiting individual pieces of baggage to 55lbs (about 23 kilos) each.
This was tough, and my big yellow tote bag began to look like a solid cube of books as I transferred as much weight from my big bag to it.
I was a bit nonplussed when I arrived at chez Czuk and found that Antof9, bless her heart, had sent me twelve John Grisham thrillers. However, I managed to squeeze them in!
And in Toronto, Heather gave me a lovely present - a paperweight!
My Silver Qantas (oneworld ruby) status entitled me to a bit more luggage than the base amount, and I'm sure that this was taken into account on some flights.
The one I was really worried about was the Blue Islands flight between Guernsey and Jersey. No US allowance, no oneworld status, and it was in a small prop aircraft. I checked when I bought my ticket and was told that this flight would be OK for me as most of the other passengers would only have a briefcase.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 08:54 pm (UTC)I find the 20 kg limit very restricting although I probably couldn't handle much more than that in one bag anyway. Our cabin luggage is also limited to 7 kg and has size/shape restrictions. I somehow doubt that a full B tote bag would fit into the measuring device.
Must say I'd not thought of cargo pant pockets.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 03:08 am (UTC)Thanks for organising the trip to Niagara Falls. I had a blast! I sent the small bottle of Icewine I won as a door prize onto TexasWren with my goodie bag because I knew she was feeling a bit left out.
Japan was interesting. Hard to know exactly what you are buying, though - everything is sealed up in packages and you don't know if the brown lumps pictured are chocolate or chips or fried squid.
The author who spoke in Toronto mentioned a scene set in the Marina Safeway in San Francisco, which is odd, because I absolutely love shopping there, and I knew I'd visit the following day. They don't sell Tim Tams, however.