Normandy endings

As we headed towards Normandy, Ian didn’t tell me where we were heading, but did tell me it was somewhere I would know once we arrived. Having passed Bayeux (my guess for our next destination) I couldn’t imagine where we were going. As we entered the car park, I really couldn’t understand why we had come to Arromanches-les-Bains, it wasn’t somewhere I had heard of, in fact I was very confused, but Ian was insistent we stopped, so we did.

Of course, once we headed through the town to the beach all became clear, Arromanches is a key location for the Normandy landings and where one of  the Mulberry Harbour ports was built (the other was at Omaha beach) to allow the unloading of equipment required for the invasion in 1944. The British built huge floating concrete caissons, towed them from England, then assembled and sank  them to form an artificial port, the Mulberry Harbour.

Sections of the Mulberry Harbour remain with huge concrete monoliths embedded in the sands and many more out at sea. It was incredible to see the remains of the harbour, yet hard to imagine the horrors that took place along this coast as you look out to a calm sea in what is now a popular little tourist seaside town. Although the shops selling war memorabilia do their best to ensure you don’t forget.

 Alongside them  we found plenty of buckets and spades on sale and cafe’s serving local specialties, including the Breton galette, so of course we had to partake.

Our final stop of this incredible trip was one we had been planning for a while. As teenagers we had both been Venture Scouts, in fact that's how we met (ahh), we are still in contact with many of our friends from that time and one of them happened to live in the perfect location for a visit before heading home.

Unfortunately there aren’t many photos of our trip to see Andy, mainly as we were far too busy talking, but we did manage to get a couple while out to dinner.

As I discovered once at home, if you hand your phone to a teenager and ask them to take a photo for you, what you find is a couple of photos of you and many, many more of them and their friend messing about!   

A perfect way to end a fabulous trip. The next morning we headed to Calais, caught the Eurotunnel, and in Folkstone hit our first traffic jam since Paris all those weeks ago. Before we knew it, we were on the ferry home.

Deux Saint Michel's

 Deux Saint Michel's

Our time at the Chateaux gave us time to think, we’d been away for about a month and had the most amazing time, but actually it felt like time to head home. Both of us were feeling ready, and as I have said previously the best thing about van life is that you can move about whenever you want to. 

We had one location (well, person actually) that we really wanted to see before we left France, so we got in touch, worked out when we could meet up. Our timetable was cast. Eurotunnel let us change our booking (again)  and we began the final stint of our incredible journey.

We had a few days before we could meet up with our friend Andy, so we got the map out, decided to head to a beach and found ourselves in Saint-Michel-Chef-Chef in the Loire. It’s a small fishing village and holiday location, but when we were there it was a bit early in the season, so lots of places were closed.

We did make more duck friends on the campsite, with Ian teaching them to stay on the grass to prevent mucky mishaps.

 We spent the day wandering along the sea front and loved the fishing huts out in the sea. I’ve never seen anything like that before.

Next stop was another Saint Michel, one I’d always wanted to visit, but never had. Ian had been before, but as he went on a junior school trip it was a while ago! This seemed like a good chance to go again!

It turns out you can stay the night in a motorhome at Mont-Saint-Michel which was just perfect for us as we only wanted a quick stop on our journey towards home. We arrived late afternoon and took the bus down the causeway as soon as we arrived. 

If you haven’t been, you should. It's a wonderful meandering street up the steep hill filled with beautiful buildings, shops, cafe’s bars and people. Even at this time of year it was busy, I hate to think what it is like midsummer. After a quick drink we walked back to Agy, stopping for a bite to eat on the way.    

We may have stayed in a car park, but it was a fabulous location!