Sorry about the cheesey title.

From Angers, we had a massive day ahead of us as we set sail for Normandy (in a Polo), with our first stop planned for Mont Saint-Michel. Along the way we passed through many a cute town where Lea was teased by old men holding their baguettes.  She was taken aback by the size and quantity…James only had half a 2-day old stale baguette and we were struggling to find that elusive boulangerie.

Mont Saint-Michel is spectacular.  It jutts out of the landscape like some kind of giant Cathedral, built on a lonely, rocky island, amongst otherwise flat tidal plains.  We were there in off season. If you haven’t been yet, GO NOW! Or be happy that to drive past it is about as good as it gets.  It’s a tiny town, on an island, with a restaurant that has a sister restaurant in Tokyo.  Get it?

From MSM we headed to the D-Day beaches, we visited Pont du Hoc and the US cemetary and the horrendously scary and intimidating beaches at Arromanches.  If we weren’t already feeling like the luckiest people in the world…there’s not much to say here.

Our first night in Normandy was in Bayeux. A sleepy (read: dingy) town with a tapestry, a (way too big for the number of inhabitants) Cathedral and…let me just check my notes……uuum….ooops…sorry, no that’s it.  But all “jokes” aside, if there’s one thing I know (and there probably isn’t), it’s definitely tapestries! And this one is definitley in the top two I’ve seen!  In Bayeux, James had foie gras again, in attempt to boost his own liver suplies, used his best Franglais to find THE ONLY PUB IN FRANCE OPEN ON A SUNDAY NIGHT and woke up with his first big headache of the trip (surprised? I am).  But, after totally blaming all the local cider for the head throbbing and lack of eyelid movement abilities, he was forced to apolgise to Normandy as he woke to realise that the “water” he’d been consuming during the night was in fact a sneaky Loire Rosé…

We toured around the surprisingly beautiful area surrounding Camembert, including a tour in the aptly named town of Livarot…and stayed the night in the pretty port of Honfleur.  The majority of the tourists there certainly helped put the Pom in Pomme.