Saonnet – London
FRIDAY 1st JULY Posted 3 weeks later.
Saonnet – Bayeux – Caen – Dozulé – Pont-l’Evêque – Beuzeville – Pont de Tancarville – Bolbec – Yvetot – Tôtes – St Saëns – Neufchâtel-en-Bray – Blangy-sur-Bresle – Abbeville – Autoroute A28 to Calais – Seafrance ferry to Dover – London. 516 km / 320 miles.
A warm, still, cloudless morning, the sort of day that the month of July would pay a fee to market itself. We breakfast in the garden in the sunshine. Nick doesn’t care to drive six miles to pick up four croissants and I hope I manage to conceal my disappointment. We go to say goodbye to the donkeys, who seem very amused by Milo.
Off through country roads more like Dorset than our image of France, until you see the architecture. Of course, like every country in western Europe, the modern domestic architecture stinks. It’s ugly and out of place, and the corners that have been cut are readily apparent. Most of the beautifully restored houses are foreign-owned; the French share with the Americans a distaste for living in the past.
A really hideous and huge concrete building disfigures the skyline on the north périphérique of Caen. I suspect it might be a university or a hospital. Abandon hope all ye who enter there.
As we approached Pont-l’Evêque (Bishopsbridge) there was another sudden architectural change — timber framed houses appeared, with reddened rather than blackened timber as in the U.K. “Look out for cheese promotions,” I warned Von, but there were none. Was this also Flaubert’s Pont-l’Eveque as in Un Coeur Simple, where I was stymied by the French word ‘genuflexion’, so I looked it up to discover it meant ‘genuflection’ — which I then had to look up in an English dictionary? There was no sign of it. I later resort to Wikipedia: it was both places. Yet the local tourist board evidently had no idea there were two reasons this one tourist knew for visiting Pont-l’Evêque.
A 2pm we stop at Neufchâtel-en-Bray for The Last Lunch, traditionally our end-of-holiday blow-out, but this time we are driving and a little pressed for time. So we take the business menu — the Menu Affaires — at a pleasant little restaurant called Les Airelles. As well as using a 1987 Michelin map for getting around France we are using a 2002 Red Guide. Egon Ronay used to warn against using out of date Ronay guides because they might ‘promote indigestion’, but we have a delicious lunch of mousseline d’avocat, foie de veau, gazpacho and rumsteack followed by a plateau de fromages with — you guessed it — Neufchâtel and Pont-l’Evêque.
The old N roads are lovely, with each town boasting its attractions:
Bienvenue à
ROMORANTIN-LE-PARKING
Ville fleurie
Sa circulation bouchée
Ses camions énormes
Ses piètons ivrognes
We have to rush to get to Calais because Von is anxious about the time spent getting the dog through his homecoming check and leaving enough time to fill the car with products from Majestic. We sail at 18:30 and I repeatedly assure her that they are now so efficient at loading that you can turn up 10 or even 5 minutes before departure and drive straight on, as we did at Dover. But she is rightly cautious, and wants to allow for the full half-hour, plus time for the dog. In the event the dog check takes 3 minutes and is done by Gwyn who has to hold the microchip reader over Milo’s chip for the man in the passport cabin, who won’t get out. Fortunately the dog appears to have the same chip he had when he came out. So we get into line 35 minutes before the 18:30 departure time. Then we discover the departure time is actually 18:40. Ah well. 18:40 comes and goes. The boat finally sails nearly an hour later, at 19:35. No reason is given for the delay. I ask at the info desk on board.
“Zaire was a technical problem wiz de 2 o’clock sailing.”
“Was it this boat?”
“Yes, sair.”
“Are we going to sink?”
“No, sair.”
So I go away, mollified but not satisfied. The boat is packed with six busloads of screaming schoolchildren, running around and crashing into each other and us. One is shouting particularly loudly, and even seems to be yelling “Yvonne! Yvonne!” She turns, and it’s Chris Engelmann and his wife Birgit from Hilden near Düsseldorf, on their way to the Goodwood Festival of Speed in their souped-up Porsche 911. We go to the bar, and I tell Chris “I only have a €10 note.”
“Thank you,” he says, “I’ll have a beer and Birgit will have a prosecco.” Luckily I also have some loose change and they don’t have prosecco at the bar. Also they have no draft beer. Two small cans of beer and two small glasses of white wine come to €16. Not great value.
Chris and Birgit were staying in Portsmouth but didn’t want to drive along the coast, so they followed us to the M25 before turning off to find the A3. We got home, flaked out and exhausted, at 9.30, to find the lights on and a Frenchman in the house. Damien had been looking after the cats and Timothy the Tortoise while we were away, and had forgotten to go home. No problem; we were grateful to him for doing it. I was less pleased when we collapsed onto the sofa and I discovered he’d drunk all my beer — AND my whisky! Growl. Not happy. He sat there apologising. I was too tired to get annoyed, and simply asked him to replace it. I had some Spanish hooch instead, which I was too exhausted to finish anyway, so Damien went home and Von cooked a delicious spaghetti vongole — first decent meal I’d had for two weeks — and so to bed.
